The Supreme Court of Canada has once again handed the Conservative government an unwelcome legal and ethical conundrum, this time by striking down the law that prohibited doctors from helping patients die. The court unanimously ruled today that the section of the Criminal Code that made so-called “physician-assisted death” illegal unjustifiably infringed on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The judges set out limitations, stipulating that doctors could hasten death only “for a competent adult person who (1) clearly consents to the termination of life and (2) has a grievous and irremediable medical condition (including an illness, disease or disability) that causes enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual.”

Just as it did when it struck down laws against prostitution last year, the court gave the government 12 months to come up with regulations to bring the decision into force. When it comes to end-of-life issues, however, the court noted that provincial governments and doctors groups might also be involved in setting new rules.

In the case of prostitution, the federal government surprised many observers last spring by refusing to liberalize the law, essentially replacing the disallowed old laws that banned activities around prostitution—such as keeping a brothel or bargaining openly to sell sex—with a sweeping new prohibition on buying sex.

On physician-assisted dying, the court allowed broad leeway for governments to impose regulations and guidelines. The ruling makes it clear, for instance, that the doctors who don’t want to help patients die could be allowed, under new rules, to decline as a matter of conscience or religious belief.

“In our view,” the judges wrote, “nothing in the declaration of invalidity that we propose to issue would compel physicians to provide assistance in dying. The declaration simply renders the criminal prohibition invalid.” Working out the details is “in the hands of the physicians’ colleges, Parliament and the provincial legislatures,” the ruling adds.

Among the many fraught issues this case forced the court to wrestle with was: for individuals facing the prospect of long, degenerative sicknesses, does denying them a doctor’s help in committing suicide sometimes lead to them take their own lives earlier, when they were still able to so, without assistance?

The trial judge in the case that was appealed to the top court found that “the prohibition on physician-assisted dying had the effect of forcing some individuals to take their own lives prematurely, for fear that they would be incapable of doing so when they reached the point where suffering was intolerable.”

In its ruling, the Supreme Court found no reason to doubt the trial judge on this troubling point, and in fact the evidence was not challenged. “It is therefore established,” said today’s ruling, “that the prohibition sometimes deprives some individuals of life.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/top-court-allows-physician-assisted-dying/feed/1Gunned down, not run down: The new face of American fatalitieshttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/gunned-down-not-run-down-the-new-face-of-american-fatalities/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/gunned-down-not-run-down-the-new-face-of-american-fatalities/#commentsMon, 05 Jan 2015 15:05:16 +0000macleans.cahttp://www.macleans.ca/?p=651185Data shows that it's just a matter of time before guns kill more Americans than cars do

The year 2015 may well be the first in recent U.S. history that firearms fatalities exceed traffic fatalities. Gun deaths by homicide, suicide or accident have been steadily increasing, following a low point in the year 2000, and are expected to top 34,000 by 2015. (The latest data from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows the number in 2012 was 33,563.) Suicide comprises about two-thirds of these deaths.

In contrast, deaths from motor vehicle accidents have dramatically declined in the same time period, and are expected to drop below 33,000 in 2015, based on the 10-year average trend. (Data from the CDC shows that motor-vehicle deaths declined by 22 per cent from 2005 to 2010 to a low of 34,935 in 2012.)

The crossing of these trend lines reflects the powerful impact public policy can have on preventing certain kinds of deaths. In the case of road safety, legislation has been enacted over the last three decades in the U.S. to make roads safer, to improve seatbelt use, to restrict privileges for young drivers and to toughen drunk-driving laws.

Restricting gun ownership, however, has been much more difficult due to the powerful lobbying efforts of the National Rifle Association and other advocacy groups, and because of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees all individuals the right to bear arms (a right that has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court).

Efforts to pass gun-control laws seemed to gain momentum in 2013 following the mass shooting the previous year at a cinema in Colorado, and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. But a motion to expand background checks for those who purchase guns was ultimately defeated by Congress.

“In the U.S. we do a poor job of preventing people with a history of violence from purchasing guns. And we make no effort to prohibit those with a history of alcohol or substance abuse from buying guns, even though research shows they are risk factors for violence,” says Garen Wintermute, a professor and physician who runs the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California at Davis.

The silver lining is that certain states have made important changes via referendum in favour of enhancing screening for gun purchasers. For example, voters in Washington recently approved a measure to expand background checks to include gun shows and private firearm sales (Colorado, Connecticut and Maryland have similar laws). “It is frustrating,” says Wintermute, “but we take a long-term approach and hope to see more changes at the state level.” Still, the overall trend is unlikely to change: guns kill people, cars not as much.

Canada’s most distinguished literary prize awards $100,000 annually to the best Canadian novel or short-story collection published in English. In this series, Maclean’s highlights the work and artistic process of the six Scotiabank Giller Prize nominees. Here, Miriam Toews, author of All My Puny Sorrows, discusses her relentless drive for narrative.

It’s all grist for Miriam Toews’s writer’s mill: a chance remark from her daughter or the deepest family tragedy. Writing is how she figures things out, how she brings “some sort of order out of the chaos,” she says. “We don’t choose the books we write, they choose us.” And when Toews’s older sister, and only sibling, Marjorie, killed herself in 2010—a dozen years after their father committed suicide—All My Puny Sorrows chose Miriam. (The title comes from a few piercing lines of Coleridge: “I, too, a sister had, an only sister . . . / To her I pour’d forth all my puny sorrows.”) It became clear over time, after Marjorie died, that Toews would have to write about it, the author says, in an attempt to create something “beautiful and true” from it.

The novel has been one of the most popular and acclaimed of the year, the only book to feature on all three of the major national literary prize short lists. That in itself is no surprise. For a decade now, since A Complicated Kindness won the Governor General’s literary award in 2004, Toews, 50, has combined critical praise and reader love like very few other CanLit authors. In part, her appeal lies in the humour woven through her books, even one as painful as Sorrows’ tale of a Toronto author and her sister, a Winnipeg-based concert pianist who wants to end her life. “I don’t see any division between the comic and the tragic,” says Toews. “I feel like I’m writing about serious things and humour is one of my tools. It’s not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me.” Her fans are clearly not disturbed by the mix of pain and laughter, though the Giller jury seems worried. “Do not be misled,” reads their citation, “this is art masquerading as light fiction.”

It’s also real life, scarcely painted over. “I gave my mother a copy before I submitted it to press, because I wanted her to be okay with it,” Toews says. “She’s always been a huge supporter, and when I asked her if she thought I was being too harsh on the mental health system, she said, no, I could have been a lot harsher. She knows, she’s been there with my father and sister.”

At the book’s heart is Toews wrestling with an acute moral dilemma. A human being wants to die; biochemistry may predetermine her to want to end her pain: Do the rest of us have an obligation to help, to not sentence her to find her own horrific and painful way out? “It’s so complex, the idea of assisted suicide. All I can remember is the suffering of my sister, and I think, ‘Couldn’t there be a way she didn’t have to die so violently and alone?’ The suicide was very, very likely, almost inevitable. We knew she would succeed in taking her own life.”

Toews is pleased Canadians are talking about the issue, but she is nudging the conversation even further along. There may be a newfound willingness to allow those suffering from intolerable physical pain to choose their own time to die, but the mentally ill? Yet Toews points out that her Marjorie’s pain was as real as a terminal cancer patient’s. “Absolutely, that psychic pain. It all hinges on what we make of mental illness—suicide has always been a part of it. There would have to be checks and balances, and things carefully weighed, but I know what options were available for my sister, and I know how I feel.”

Miriam Toews on the writing process

The writing life is one long, never-ending search for narrative. Well, it’s not even a conscious searching. It happens even while you’re busy buying groceries and when you’re fast asleep. It’s a curse. A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative. A writer doesn’t live “in the moment”. A writer steals the moment and stashes it away to gnaw on later in the day, in a dark and lonely room. When I ask my daughter how her cousin is and she says, “Not good. He’s fallen in love,” all I can think is: Ah , now that’s the perfect intro to a new story. The writing life is relentless. A writer is nothing but a rendering plant, a place where things go, things that were once alive, to get turned into something else. A rendering plant makes use of everything, the darkest moments and the happiest moments, too, like birthdays spent at Coney Island, riding the Wonder Wheel, and hollering, “On your mark, get set, go!” as your children race toward the sea.

Diagnosing a patient’s risk for suicide is notoriously tricky, and subjective. “Current methods involve asking someone, ‘Are you suicidal?’ ” says Zachary Kaminsky, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. “Some people won’t answer truthfully,” and doctors might miss other cues. In the future, it could come down to a simple blood test. Kaminsky and his colleagues have pinpointed a change in one human gene that seems to indicate an elevated risk for suicide.

Kaminsky, who was formerly based at the University of Toronto, studies epigenetics, “or how the environment and, in this case, stress, changes your genes,” he explains, “and that’s what we found.” In the new study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, he and his team landed on a single gene: SKA2, which is expressed in the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain involved in impulse control and emotion regulation), and plays an important role in how the brain responds to stress hormones. In the first part of the study, they looked at brain samples from mentally ill and healthy people. In those who died by suicide, they saw levels of SKA2 were much lower. Not only that, some subjects had an epigenetic change to the way SKA2 functioned, adding chemicals called methyl groups to the gene. In those who died by suicide, higher levels of methylation were seen.

To further test this, Kaminsky’s team then took blood samples from a group of participants, and found similar methylation increases at SKA2 among those with suicidal thoughts or attempts. Using blood test results, they were able to predict which participants had experienced suicidal thoughts, or had attempted suicide, with 80 per cent accuracy. Among those with more severe risk, the accuracy was even higher, at 90 per cent.

The Johns Hopkins team isn’t the first to look at creating a blood test for suicide risk. Another group, led by Dr. Alexander Niculescu at Indiana University school of medicine, has been tracking blood biomarkers for suicide risk and other conditions. Kaminsky acknowledges that such a blood test might create concern among patients who test positive. “Our finding isn’t 100 per cent deterministic,” he emphasizes. “It represents a vulnerability [to stress]. It means their risk is higher.” There are still lots of questions, including whether the genetic marker changes over time. And it’s impossible to say when such a blood test could actually be used in the clinic, if at all.

Kaminsky has more studies planned, including one of U.S. soldiers, a group that seems to be at heightened risk for suicide. If a blood test does become available, “it could really help facilitate suicide screening in the psychiatric emergency room,” he says. Ultimately, the research could save lives.

ST. LOUIS – The suicide of a young Toronto woman has prompted the University of Missouri, where she went on a swimming scholarship, to bolster its mental health services.

Sasha Menu Courey, 20, killed herself in June 2011 in a Boston psychiatric hospital soon after being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and two months after an earlier suicide attempt.

Her parents, Mike Menu and Lynn Courey, have channelled their grief into a mental-health foundation named in her memory. They want accountability from the school and say the university and its athletics department should have by now investigated her alleged off-campus rape by as many as three football players in February 2010.

Late Wednesday, the school’s Board of Curators voted to hire a law firm to review the school’s handling of the case.

“We just want to make sure that changes are made,” Mike Menu said. “We need more than Band-Aids. We need a transformation.”

University leaders say they didn’t learn about the purported attack until after Menu Courey committed suicide 16 months later. They also said they followed the letter of the law because they didn’t have specific knowledge of the attack and no victim to interview.

University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe spoke personally Wednesday about the young swimmer’s death, noting that his own daughter is a first-year college athlete.

“One of our students is dead,” he said. “And I don’t want to feel that anymore.”

Missouri didn’t immediately investigate the death of Menu Courey, who by then had withdrawn from classes at the university’s urging and lost her financial aid.

The school said in a statement Tuesday that a 2012 Columbia Daily Tribune article about Menu Courey’s suicide briefly alluded to the alleged assault, but didn’t meet the legal standard that the school “reasonably should know about student-on-student harassment that creates a hostile environment.”

The school says Menu Courey’s parents ignored its request for more information a year ago after it discovered an online chat transcript with a campus rape counsellor in which Menu Courey mentioned an earlier attack.

Missouri initially responded to an ESPN story about the swimmer by defending its handling of the case while criticizing the news organization’s “skewed and flawed reporting.” But soon after, the university said it was turning over information on the case to Columbia police, since the alleged attack happened off-campus.

A man identified in the ESPN story as a close friend of Menu Courey’s said he had also seen a tape of the alleged incident and three football players were involved. But that tape was now missing, he told ESPN.

Records indicated Menu Courey spoke about her assault in 2010 to campus personnel, including two doctors, according to the ESPN report, which also said an athletic department administrator knew of her claim. The university has denied the administrator was told about the assault.

Schools across the U.S. are spending more time and money fighting campus rape in response to stricter federal enforcement of gender discrimination laws.

The White House has called it a public health epidemic, and President Barack Obama last week announced the formation of a new task force on university sex assault, citing statistics that show one in five female students are assaulted while in college, but only one in eight victims report attacks.

But balancing the needs of individual students — including those who report attacks but don’t want a criminal investigation — with protecting the larger community is vexing for many schools.

Colleges and universities are also required to report campus crimes to the federal government under a 1990 law known as the Clery Act.

At least 50 schools have bolstered their efforts in recent years. Complaints of violations related to sexual violence are also increasing, a sign Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education, attributes to new vigilance on campus.

The University of Missouri’s efforts to reduce sexual violence on campus are extensive. A campus equity office led by a lawyer oversees compliance with Title IX, the federal law more commonly known for ensuring equal participation by women in college sports but also has broader discrimination protections. There also is counselling and help available through the campus women’s centre and the Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention Center.

Students who eschew legal intervention can still seek a campus disciplinary hearing. And the university can also help students switch dorms or class schedules or bar contact outright.

“There are many resources out there, but there’s not really any (sense) that she (Menu Courey) was provided with those resources,” said Zachary Wilson, development director of the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/education/uniandcollege/suicide-of-canadian-student-prompts-changes-at-u-s-school/feed/0One year after teen’s death, bullying is on the agendahttp://www.macleans.ca/education/uniandcollege/one-year-after-teens-death-bullying-is-on-the-agenda/
http://www.macleans.ca/education/uniandcollege/one-year-after-teens-death-bullying-is-on-the-agenda/#commentsWed, 09 Oct 2013 21:30:50 +0000The Canadian Presshttp://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/?p=59415Suicide prevention stepped up from Nova Scotia to BC

VICTORIA – When Tad Milmine walks into a classroom, students don’t know anything about him.

They don’t know he’s an RCMP officer. They don’t know he’s gay. They don’t know he’s been bullied and abused.

But within minutes, students know he’s there for them, especially in their darkest, most vulnerable moments, Milmine said.

He speaks to them through the spirits of Ontario’s Jamie Hubley, Nova Scotia’s Rehtaeh Parsons and British Columbia’s Amanda Todd — all teen suicide victims mercilessly bullied by their peers before killing themselves. Todd died one year ago Thursday.

“I’m up there, just a guy named Tad,” said the Surrey, B.C., RCMP officer during an off-duty interview. “That’s how I get introduced. While I’m speaking they don’t even know I’m a police officer until about halfway through.”

Milmine said he started talking to students across Canada last October, at about the same time the country was emotionally shaken by Todd’s suicide.

The 15-year-old, Grade 10 student from Port Coquitlam, B.C., posted a video detailing her anguish over the sustained harassment she endured at school and on the Internet about images of her body posted on the Internet.

At one point in Todd’s video, which now has received over 28 million views, she holds up a handwritten note that says, “I have nobody. I need someone.”

Milmine said he heard Todd’s, Hubley’s and Parsons’s cries for help and decided to offer young people a safe, compassionate and non-judgmental place, creating his www.bullyingendshere.ca website that promises to respond quickly to every youth message.

“I could easily just make a video and send it out to every school, but that defeats the entire purpose of what I’m trying to do,” he said. “I’m trying to be the person that I didn’t have in school. The person to look up to, to talk to — to be there.”

Milmine said whenever he visits a school he expects messages that night from 10 per cent to 25 per cent of the students.

“It’s a human being that they’re messaging, that they know, they trust,” he said. “That’s why what I’m doing is absolutely exploding because the youth are responding by the thousands. I have so many emails, you’d be bawling, as I do when I’m reading these, thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh, these are innocent kids.’”

Carol Todd, who met Milmine recently, said the one-year anniversary of her daughter’s death falls on World Mental Health Day. Amanda Todd struggled with mental health issues, she said.

Todd said over the past year she’s realized that confronting the issues of teen bullying and suicide goes beyond laws, websites and school programs. The issue requires constant vigilance by authorities, teachers, parents and young people themselves.

“The truth comes out, I guess, in the data and if the bullying aspects are indeed changing,” she said. “But how do you measure that? Measurable versus non-measurable, how do we gather data to see if what we are implementing works?”

Todd said collecting data on teen suicide, bullying and cyberbullying represents only one piece of the complex puzzle to ultimately prevent young people from harassing their peers to the point where they give up and take their own lives.

The British Columbia Coroner’s Service recently released a study of 91 youth suicides that recommended keeping records of the victims sexual orientation, their social media use and whether they experienced bullying in their lives.

“There has to be many approaches coming at this problem and that has to come from the community,” said Todd. “It has to come from schools. It has to come from parental teaching. It’s one problem, but we all have to target it like a community village. We have anti-bullying day. We have a pink-shirt day. Every day should be pink-shirt day.”

Cyberbullying expert and Dalhousie University law professor Wayne MacKay said high-profile teen suicides connected to cyberbullying have spurred government action across Canada, but the issue stretches beyond government and law enforcement.

“Definitely, it’s bigger than just government,” said MacKay from Halifax, N.S. “Governments are doing a lot more, unfortunately it seemed to take the tragedies like Amanda Todd or Rehtaeh Parsons, and many others in between, to get them to that place.”

MacKay served as chairman of a task force that submitted a report in February 2012 to the Nova Scotia government — Respectful and Responsible Relationships: There’s No App for That — that made 85 recommendations.

“I was under no illusion that we would solve the problems of bullying and cyberbullying but I do think that our recommendations, if implemented, will make lives better for many young Nova Scotians,” said the report.

MacKay said the task force discovered surprising and disturbing reasons why adults are often the last to know children are subjected to bullying.

“We found the No. 1 reason that victims of bullying and cyberbullying don’t tell trusted adults like a parent is (they think) they (the adults) might cut me off the Internet,” he said. “The No. 2 reason: it will only get worse.”

Parsons, from Dartmouth, N.S., was taken off life-support after a suicide attempt last April that her family said was brought on by months of bullying. The family said she was tormented after a digital photograph of her allegedly being sexually assaulted in November 2011 was passed around her school.

Nova Scotia’s Cyber-Safety Act, introduced in April, includes the creation of an investigative unit dedicated to pursuing and penalizing so-called cyberbullies and makes parents liable for their child’s bullying.

The RCMP in Nova Scotia originally said there wasn’t enough evidence to lay charges in Parsons’s case, but after her death the investigation was reopened and one man was charged with two counts of distributing child pornography, and another man faces charges of distributing and making child pornography.

A suicide note left by Jamie Hubley, an openly gay Ontario teenager, spoke of the pain of bullying.

Charges were not laid in connection with the deaths of Todd or Hubley.

MacKay said anti-bullying initiatives must go beyond declaring bullying an offence. They must become complete community efforts.

“There needs to be education, prevention and legal responses,” he said.

Most provinces already have laws that make it a duty for anybody involved in the education system, from teachers to janitors, to report possible bullying issues to school officials, he said.

B.C. Premier Christy Clark said Todd’s death was a tragedy that should never happen to any family, but out of her personal anguish poured nationwide emotion that prompted commitments to seek to protect young people from threats and intimidation.

“Amanda’s loss was a terrible loss for her family and her community and her school and everybody who loved her, but I hope her family knows that her death did give a real impetus to politicians and leaders and school officials across this country to address bullying with real new agency,” said Clark from Toronto.

In June 2012, Clark announced a $2 million, 10-point strategy to address bullying in schools and ensure students feel safe, accepted and respected.

B.C.’s www.erasebullying.ca program allows students to report bullying anonymously.

Glen Hansman, B.C. Teachers’ Federation first vice-president, said teachers have been pioneering anti-homophobia and anti-racism initiatives in schools, but they are awaiting a more co-ordinated approach from the provincial government that links programs with schools, school districts and the education ministry.

Milmine, who is visiting Vancouver area schools this week, said students are remembering Amanda Todd with all their hearts, but he wants adults to always remember to take the time to hear what young people are saying.

“A youth doesn’t go from simply having the perfect life to all of a sudden being suicidal. There’s a big grey area and we don’t have anything focusing on that big grey area.”

A 2004 study published in the medical Journal of Pediatrics found that about one in seven Canadian children aged 11 to 16 are victims of bullying.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/education/uniandcollege/one-year-after-teens-death-bullying-is-on-the-agenda/feed/0I dropped out of McGill because of depressionhttp://www.macleans.ca/education/uniandcollege/i-dropped-out-of-mcgill-because-of-depression/
http://www.macleans.ca/education/uniandcollege/i-dropped-out-of-mcgill-because-of-depression/#commentsTue, 24 Sep 2013 13:49:45 +0000Susannah Feinsteinhttp://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/?p=58916Advice from a woman who couldn't find help on campus

I dropped out of McGill University because of depression. It was the type that begins as a barely perceptible malaise but quickly penetrates your mind and renders you nearly unable to speak, think, or even walk. Perhaps the most common misunderstanding of depression is that it’s simply an overarching sadness permeating your positive thoughts. In its most serious form, the illness may actually leave you unable to feel anything—comfort or happiness, fear or rage. It wasn’t until I’d reached this level that I finally decided to take time off from my routine and accept help. If you find any aspect of this story relatable, I hope that you seek help immediately.

I vividly remember the first (and last) time I used McGill Mental Health Services. My parents had been asking me to get in touch with someone for months. I’d always responded to these requests by saying no, I wouldn’t see anyone because I was “fine” and “therapists are for people who need attention.” But after two years of growing increasingly despondent, I knew I had to do something. So I temporarily abandoned my mask of confidence and called.

To be guaranteed an appointment, even during summer vacation, I had to call a month in advance. I got a time slot and, a month later, made my first visit to the Brown building.

After I filled out a survey, the receptionist at the Mental Health desk directed me to the office of a triage therapist, where I was greeted with a flat, “Hello, please take a seat.” She asked me why I was there, and I couldn’t articulate further than that I was “unhappy.” She asked if I’d had interpersonal problems—friendship issues, family issues, issues with a significant other, etc. To all these prompts, I responded truthfully that no, I had none. At the conclusion of our ten minute long meeting, she informed me that no, I was “not depressed”, that there was nothing she or a therapist could do for me, and that I should go to the Career Planning Service and talk to someone there. This interaction deterred me from seeking further help, as I left McGill Mental Health that day convinced that nobody would ever understand my general discontentment with life.

When school started again in the fall, I began a pathetic attempt to feign mental and emotional stability. My friends and professors had no idea that I was having personal issues, because I appeared fine. I still went to parties, and talked with friends for hours. I even comforted a few people who might have been facing depression themselves but privately I was unraveling. I started to have outbursts of anger or sadness. The second I was alone, I’d cry almost uncontrollably. I had to leave classes to cry. I had to leave conferences to cry.

But I convinced myself that I could push through it and within a few weeks of the school year I started to have vivid suicidal thoughts. I didn’t think I’d ever act on them, but thoughts of ideation consumed hours of my day—how I might do it, what I would be wearing. My mom started to call multiple times a day, just to make sure I’d pick up. I thought that I had to maintain a semblance of composure or face abandonment by friends. I began to make up excuses for leaving social gatherings. My grades plummeted. The depression grew progressively worse until one day I had to barricade myself in a closet until an overpowering wave of suicidal thoughts passed. Two days later, I walked out of my first final of the semester and with my last ounce of sanity withdrew from all my classes and left McGill.

Ignoring the first signs of depression is like ignoring a suspicious lump growing on your body. Like a tumor, depression, if left untreated, will wreak havoc on your health in virtually every respect. It will become more dangerous to you and perhaps those around you. It may well kill you. Last spring, if I hadn’t exercised an uncharacteristic level of restraint, I probably would have been a victim of depression myself.

McGill is struggling financially and McGill Mental Health Services are operating on a very limited budget. If students are guaranteed access to these services, I see no issue. The real problem with these services is that they’re incompatible with the needs of a deeply depressed person at almost every level. A triage therapist might misdiagnose you. They might see hundreds of students a week and be unconsciously eager to get you out of the office. Overcoming a bout of depression will take many appointments. It might take dozens of therapists until you even find one with whom you’re comfortable. If you’re feeling really low, you might not even have the energy or motivation to make an appointment. It’s incredibly difficult to address mental health issues at any large university, not just McGill.

As someone who’s cycled through many phases of depression, I want to give some advice. If you start to notice a negative change in your mood, go to McGill Mental Health immediately. Don’t write off uneasy feelings as nothing because you know yourself better than any triage therapist. If your negative moods begin to intensify, leave. Take a semester off. Take a year off. Transfer. Go back home or to wherever you feel safest. Reconnect with your family. Find a therapist you can talk to. If you’re willing, try antidepressants. But please, if you find yourself feeling progressively more numb or ‘empty,’ get as far away from school as you can. It might not be financially convenient, or fit with the career progression schedule you had planned, but your life is invaluable and you can always return.

I knew two people who decided to end their lives at McGill in the past year. Horrific doesn’t even begin to describe a suicide at 21 or 22. Although it may seem like a truism, life really is worth living, and things do get better. I had a tortuous couple years, but that’s not much time at all. I’m at a new university, I like what I’m studying, and I’m in a city that’s always been home to me. Although I’m certainly not ‘cured’ and my life’s far from perfect, I’m happy again. I couldn’t be any luckier that I decided to take time off of school. Be your own advocate – get help now.

It was a brutal way to make a point: On July 6, Erol Benzer, a 37-year-old father, walked up to the front door of a courthouse near Izmir, a resort city on Turkey’s Aegean coast, pulled out his government-issued pistol and fatally shot himself in the head.

In a final message posted on Facebook, Benzer, a 13-year veteran of the police force, wrote: “You, my colleagues, each deserve personal rights, human rights, human working and living conditions. Even police have the right of justice, of living and working as a human being. I am making myself a martyr for the sake of democracy. I hope mine will be the last police suicide.”

Benzer’s death came on the heels of a rash of police suicides during a month of intense anti-government protests across Turkey. The official response was grim, even for a country with a history of violently suppressing dissent. Tens of thousands of police officers were deployed on the streets of major cities, firing tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets at largely peaceful protesters in quantities that many consider illegal under international humanitarian law.

The results were effective, but came at a heavy cost. When the smoke settled, five protesters were dead and thousands more injured, with many losing eyes to rubber bullets and others left in comas after being hit in the head by tear-gas canisters.

Since the protests ended in late June, Istanbul has transformed from a city of summertime revelry to what looks like a police state. Anti-riot police remain deployed on the streets in and around Taksim Square, the epicentre of the protests, striking hammer blows to any attempts at reviving street action.

The effects on the officers themselves has been devastating: six suicides in a two-week span during the height of the protests—this in a country with an average yearly suicide rate among police of around 14 per 100,000 officers, according to the recently formed Turkish police union, Emniyet-Sen (the rate in the U.S. is 17 per 100,000). Even taking under-reporting into account, the Turkish rate remains significantly lower than in most Western countries. Taken in context, however, six suicides in two weeks is alarming.

“It shows just how dysfunctional the police services have become,” says Emrullah Aksakal, a former police officer turned lawyer and police activist. “What the police were expected to do during those protests was not humane. It pushed some officers over the edge.”

Indeed, the culture inside Turkey’s police services has gone from bad to worse since the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) took power in 2002, Aksakal adds. Political interference, common throughout Turkey’s often-violent 90-year history, has reached frightening levels.

“It’s become unbearable,” says Atilla Aktin, a former officer in Istanbul. “It’s like the Indian caste system. The commanders at the top are all AKP men. We are overworked and expected to follow orders without question.”

Aktin, a founding member of the Emniyet-Sen, was booted from the force in 2010 on what he says were trumped-up terrorism charges. “I was found not guilty of those charges,” he says, “but I was never re-hired by the police. The issue wasn’t the terrorism charge—it was the union I was setting up.”

According to numerous Turkish police officers (many requesting anonymity) who spoke to Maclean’s, unionizing has become a cause célèbre, but it’s not something they want to discuss. Creating a police union is still illegal under Turkish law and currently there are 250 officers being investigated for union activities, according to Turkey’s Aydinlik newspaper.

For many of those officers, the actions on the streets during the protests represent their own private desires: more democracy, more human rights and the freedom to live with dignity. But none of that seems possible for the time being. Sporadic protests and potentially larger demonstrations appear to be the reality for Turkey in the near future. This week, protesters gathered again to challenge the AKP’s growing hubris, this time in response to lengthy prison sentences meted out to former military personnel, journalists and academics, all accused of being part of an organization intent on overthrowing the government.

Tear gas and rubber bullets are in the air again through the streets of Istanbul. And it may not be long before another Turkish officer, despite Erol Benzer’s wish to the contrary, will take his own life.

That economic downturns and spikes in unemployment tend to drive up suicides isn’t news. People started to notice the correlation back in the 19th century. A new book by David Stuckler of Oxford University and Sanjay Basu of Stanford, though, argues that austerity can make things considerably worse. Suicide epidemics, they say, aren’t an unavoidable accompaniment to contracting GDPs: Social safety nets can considerably reduce or even eliminate rises in self-inflicted deaths during economic hard times.

The book is part of a growing body of research showing that the public health harms of the Great Recession were particularly severe in countries that, wittingly or unwittingly, embraced austerity. Italy and Spain, which cut spending on health and social protection, both saw suicide rate spikes after 2007. In Greece, where budget slashing measures were most draconian, suicides rose by a jaw-dropping 60 per cent in the first few years since the onset of the crisis. As Stuckler and Basu wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed, the crisis-stricken country has also seen infant mortality rise by 40 per cent, malaria rearing its head again in certain regions (after mosquito-extermination programs fell under the government’s ax) and a 200 per cent jump in HIV infections since 2011, likely as a result of increased drug use among the unemployed combined with cuts to needle-exchange programs.

Contrast that with Iceland, say Stuckler and Basu, which managed to sail through a massive banking crisis and nine-fold increase in unemployment without swaying from pre-crisis suicide rates. The country’s secret according to the two scholars? Icelanders voted to reject austerity and to “pay off foreign creditors gradually.” Every one of them preserved their health benefits intact.

Admittedly, the example of Iceland raises some questions. The country, for one, was able to let its currency plunge, a move that normally helps soften the impact of an economic downturn by stimulating a country’s exports. Eurozone countries did not have that option. Stuckler and Basu acknowledge this but argue that the contrast in outcomes between Greece and Iceland is so stark it cannot be denied that “an economic crisis does not necessarily have to involve a public health crisis.” But currency depreciation also reduces the inflation-adjusted value of a country’s debt, meaning that Iceland will pay back less than it actually owes. Did Icelanders effectively pass on some of the health effects of their economic collapse to others, such as Great Britain and the Netherlands, where many sunk their life savings into Iceland’s once booming banks?

On the other hand, there are more examples of countries with generous health care and unemployment protection that managed to withstand skyrocketing joblessness with no impact on suicides. Finland, for one. Between 1990 and 1993, according to a 2009 study Stuckler and Basu co-authored with others, the country’s unemployment rate shot up to 16 per cent, from 2 per cent but suicides continued to dip as they had for years before.

Mind you, the studies are no ammunition for advocates of tax-and-spend government. After all, ultra-generous and prolonged unemployment benefits, for example, increase long-term and structural unemployment, which has its own heavy public health toll. This research makes the case for smarter, rather than bigger, government: think extensive re-training for the jobless and public assistance to help workers re-join the labour force. Programs that temporarily places job seekers into part-time work also seemed to limit the negative mental health effects of unemployment spells.

Maybe countries should have some sort of public health automatic stabilizers. Income taxes and unemployment insurance are notoriously tied to the business cycle: when things get tough, one drops and the other rises. This helps stabilize the economy. Perhaps public spending on mental health that automatically swings up whenever GDP takes a dive would stabilize public health outcomes.

Be that as it may, the public health record of the Great Recession is a damning testament to the human costs of cutting the budget when the economy is in dire straits. American lawmakers, who oversaw $85 billion in sweeping spending cuts this year while unemployment is still at 7.5 per cent and workforce participation rates at record lows, might want to think twice about new, drastic rounds of fiscal tightening.

Almost a billion viewers across the planet know him as the Star Wars Kid, but they’ve never heard him speak, until now.

Ghyslain Raza was a normal high-school student in small-town Quebec back in 2002, a shy 14-year-old who liked to make videos. In 2003, classmates posted one of those videos on the Internet without his knowledge–in it, Raza wields a makeshift light saber, clumsily imitating a Star Wars Jedi knight.

The video went viral, and the Trois-Rivières teen became one of the earliest and highest-profile victims of a massive cyberbullying attack, one that played out among classmates and strangers online.

“What I saw was mean. It was violent. People were telling me to commit suicide,” the now-25-year-old recalls.

After a 10-year silence, Raza speaks out for the first time in an exclusive interview with award-winning French-Canadian journalist Jonathan Trudel (L’actualité magazine). The full interview also appears in English in the latest issue of Maclean’s.

Recorded while Raza was “goofing around” alone at his school’s TV club studio — the group had been working on a Star Wars parody — the video had soon been seen by tens of millions, all the more remarkable in a pre-YouTube world.

Raza said he lost what few friends he had in the fallout, and had to change schools. “In the common room, students climbed onto tabletops to insult me,” he told L’actualité.

It was “a very dark period,” he said. “No matter how hard I tried to ignore people telling me to commit suicide, I couldn’t help but feel worthless, like my life wasn’t worth living.”

Raza, now a law-school graduate from McGill, said he was driven to speak out by the recent spate of high-profile cases of cyberbullying, some of which have pushed their victims to commit suicide. If the same situation were to happen today, he said he hopes school authorities would help him through it.

Raza said he hopes talking about his experience will help others to deal with cyberbullying, and urged other young victims to “overcome (their) shame” and seek help.

“You’ll survive. You’ll get through it,” he said. “And you’re not alone. You are surrounded by people who love you.”

The cousin of a young woman who committed suicide after an alleged assault and months of bullying issued an emotional appeal to people Thursday not to use violence to avenge her death.

Angella Parsons stood before a sombre crowd of about 300 people in a Halifax park to reflect on the short life of Rehtaeh Parsons and the lessons that should be learned from her loss.

“My family asks people not to respond with violence and aggression to this terrible tragedy,” she told the crowd through tears.

“We’re all angry. … Rehtaeh was angry, however, feeling angry and responding in anger and aggression are two very different things.”

The gathering came after Rehtaeh’s family said she hanged herself last week and was taken off life-support Sunday, following months of bullying linked to an alleged sexual assault by four boys at a house party in 2011.

Her mother has said a picture of the alleged assault was circulated to other teenagers, prompting relentless torment by her peers and a steady decline in the young girl’s mental health.

An outreach worker urged people to reach out to young people struggling with depression, abuse and bullying.

“Although we may have lost Rehtaeh and she may have sunk below the surface, please remember that there are youth who have been treading water for a long time and they are getting tired,” Ardath Whynacht told the group as sweet grass and incense wafted through the cool evening air.

Mourners held candles and posters of some of the many pictures of the 17-year-old that have surfaced on countless websites as her story captivated people across the country and the world.

As the sun set on a chilly evening, a native elder read a prayer: “We pray for an end to violence against young women and girls,” while another group sang and drummed a traditional honour song.

Kim Wall said she came to the event with her 18-year-old daughter to show support for Rehtaeh’s family and express her indignation at the alleged sexual abuse.

“We have to fear for our daughters and I’m just done with this,” she said. “This is a young girl’s life that was taken. Dear God, let something positive come out of this.”

Premier Darrell Dexter and Halifax Mayor Mike Savage mixed with the crowd, who called on politicians to enhance supports for young people and closely probe the family’s allegations about the assault.

The RCMP have said they are aware of reports that some are suggesting harm against people involved in the investigation.

In Calgary, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the story has shocked him and his wife, Laureen.

“I can just tell you Laureen and I as parents of a teenage daughter we’re just sickened seeing a story like this,” he said.

“I think we’ve got to stop just using just the term bullying to describe some of these things. Bullying to me has a connotation of kind of kids misbehaving. What we are dealing with in some of these circumstances is simply criminal activity,” he said.

“It is youth criminal activity. It is violent criminal activity. It is sexual criminal activity and it is often Internet criminal activity.”

Harper said the government will continue to encourage anti-bullying strategies.

“Obviously we are looking at ways to combat this and to deal with this when it happens,” he added.

Earlier Thursday, Dexter told the legislature he wanted a timely response to satisfy the public’s concerns about Rehtaeh’s case.

“I will do everything in my power to create a community that is better equipped to prevent these situations, rather than a community that struggles to find a way to deal with them,” Dexter said.

Marilyn More, the minister responsible for the status of women, was appointed to oversee the provincial government’s response to the girl’s death. She will work with the ministers of justice, education, health and community services to assess support services for people who face sexual violence.

Dexter said he hopes a series of measures aimed at improving mental health services, policing and education will be rolled out as soon as possible.

The government has come under criticism after Justice Minister Ross Landry initially ruled out the possibility of reviewing how the RCMP handled allegations that Rehtaeh was sexually assaulted in November 2011.

Landry later changed course, saying he has asked senior officials for options to review how the Mounties and the Public Prosecution Service concluded there were insufficient grounds to lay charges against the boys.

Education Minister Ramona Jennex has also asked the Halifax Regional School Board to review its response to Rehtaeh’s case.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/education/uniandcollege/halifax-vigil-remembers-rehtaeh-parsons/feed/0Survivor of crash that killed football players says he considered suicidehttp://www.macleans.ca/news/survivor-of-crash-that-killed-football-players-says-he-considered-suicide/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/survivor-of-crash-that-killed-football-players-says-he-considered-suicide/#commentsWed, 27 Feb 2013 03:05:12 +0000The Canadian Presshttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=354483GRANDE PRAIRIE, Alta. – Zach Judd often thinks about suicide since a car crash in northern Alberta killed his four high school buddies and fellow football teammates.
The fact that…

His truck collided with a car carrying the five members of the Warriors football team from Grande Prairie Composite High School on October 22, 2011.

Court heard Holubowich had earlier been drinking with co-workers at a Grande Prairie bowling alley and was driving at speeds as high as 151 km/h on Highway 668 on the way home to the nearby town of Wembley.

The football players had just left a party outside the city. But within minutes their car and three others pulled off the highway and into the driveway of a nearby business. One by one, they all quickly made U-turns on the highway to go in the other direction.

Their car, the last to make the U-turn, was struck as it straddled the centre line.

Walter Borden-Wilkins and Tanner Hildebrand, both 15, and Matthew Deller and Vince Stover, both 16, were killed. Judd was pulled from the wreckage.

Holubowich never stopped to see if the boys were OK or call 911. He ran on foot to his workplace, an oilfield transportation company, where RCMP found him an hour later.

The Crown and defence have agreed the man should receive a prison term of three years and a driving prohibition for another three years. But Court of Queen’s Bench Justice William Tilleman said he needed time to think about whether it’s an appropriate punishment.

The families of the football players, many were wearing orange Warriors sweatshirts with the boys’ team numbers on them, all said that three years is too little. The judge said he will decide on the sentence Wednesday.

He then went on to talk about his disappointment that people still haven’t learned about the dangers of drinking and driving.

“Every death from drunk driving is preventable,” said the judge. “Don’t pick up the keys.”

The teenagers were the responsible ones that night. Autopsy results show the boy driving the car, Matthew, had no alcohol or drugs in his system.

Holubowich — a tall, strapping, heavy-duty mechanic apprentice —tried not to cry as he uttered his guilty pleas in a hushed voice. He later read aloud a prepared statement to the families and friends of the boys who filled the courtroom.

“I do not expect you to forgive me but I do hope you accept my apology as genuine,” he said. “I would give anything to change the outcome of that night. I am truly very sorry.”

Defence lawyer Chris Millsap said his client takes full responsibility for causing the crash, despite rumours after the accident that he blamed the teen who was driving the car for making the U-turn.

He described his client as a humble young man, full of regret, who will never forget what he did.

“This is a kind, very young man, who — for a split second — made a horrible decision.”

Leon Deller, Matthew’s father, told Holubowich in his victim impact statement that he’s working on forgiveness but it may never come.

“I don’t hate you as a person,” he said. “I grew up believing in God. So my belief is the sentence here is not the one that matters.

“God will be the only true judge to judge you.”

Judd later said outside court that he doesn’t believe Holubowich is sorry. And he hopes the judge decides to ditch the three-year recommendation and hand him more time behind bars.

“It depends on how much you value a life. He killed four kids.”

Judd spent 11 days in a coma suffering from a severe brain injury. He said he doesn’t remember the crash at all but has been told bits and pieces.

His older brother, Louis, came across the crash scene and found him in the wreckage: “My brother sat beside me, holding my hand while I was drowning in my own blood.”

He said his recovery has been frustratingly slow. He had to learn to walk and talk again. And he has permanently lost hearing in one ear and it affects his balance.

He hasn’t been able to get his driver’s licence back and may never play football or other sports again.

He has a different life and a different personality, he said.

“Just the whole anger thing plays a big role … I get annoyed really easy, have no patience for anyone. People make me mad and I’m just ready to go, up to the point where I don’t really care about myself.

“The way I see it is I don’t really matter if I die. If I die, that’s fair.”

The initial shock of the crash turned the entire community upside down and had football players across the country mourning four boys they never knew.

People packed an arena for a memorial service. Many high school teams across Canada honoured the players with moments of silence at their games. The Edmonton Eskimos and Calgary Stampeders of the CFL put the Warriors logo on their helmets for the last couple of games of the regular season.

The Warriors toughed it out and finished their season. They went on to win their league championship before losing in the quarter-finals at provincials. Their final run made national sports headlines.

Coach Rick Gilson, the same man who helped RCMP deliver news of the crash to the boys’ families, was later named NFL Canada’s youth coach of the year for being a rock and role model after the crash.

A new wing at the school, called a health and wellness centre, has opened since the accident. The $600,000 addition houses a full-time social worker, three guidance counsellors, career counsellors, RCMP liaison officers and a health nurse.

But there are no memorials or tributes dedicated to the dead boys at the school. Grief experts told school officials it was best for students not to be reminded of the deaths and to try to move on.

Moments before he jumped off Vancouver’s Oak Street Bridge, Joshua Beharry texted his brother. He was hoping the message would be delayed—his brother had notoriously bad cell reception—but he wanted his family to know what had happened. Then, after waiting for a break in traffic, he leaped over the railing and into the Fraser River. “It was terrifying,” says Beharry, now 25. But even after jumping, he didn’t regret it. “I was thinking ‘this is the right thing to do.’ There was no chance of me ever getting better.”

Just over three years later, Beharry is speaking out about his suicide attempt in hopes that people like him will get help without feeling stigmatized.

He describes hitting the water as the most physically painful experience of his life. Overtaken by panic and survival instincts, he swam to a nearby platform underneath the bridge and began screaming for help. Luckily, his brother had received the text immediately and alerted police and their parents. Beharry was taken to the Intensive Care Unit at Vancouver General Hospital.

He suffered several broken ribs, fractured vertebrae, a punctured lung and contusions in his brain but he felt lucky to have survived. “I had a huge flood of emotions. I was happy to have my family there with me,” he says. It was the first time he’d felt positive in months.

Beharry’s decision to commit suicide came after a grueling struggle with depression that had started the previous summer. At first he was just more stressed out than usual, often dwelling over minor things like not being social enough. He was an A student, but unhappy with the computer science degree he was pursuing at the University of British Columbia. Gradually, he lost his appetite, had problems sleeping and made up excuses to not hang out with his friends.

“One night I just couldn’t sleep at all and I realized that my level of stress was way out of control,” he says. He told his parents what was going on and went to see his family doctor who prescribed low-dose antidepressants. With a counsellor he broke down his days into a series of small tasks—getting out of bed, taking a shower, picking out clothes.

Twenty-minute walks around the block exhausted him. All the while he was still taking two courses at UBC. Things improved marginally but by December they got bad again.

“I was pretty hopeless and beaten and each day I was struggling to make it through. It was just very much a grind,” he says. Thoughts of ending his life were never far from his mind. “If I was at the [commuter train] stop, I wouldn’t be able to not think about trying to kill myself.”

After the attempt, Beharry began the slow process of physical and mental recovery. He did rehabilitative therapy for his back, started seeing a psychiatrist, adjusted his medications and openly discussed his situation with friends. Near the end of the summer, he joined Kaleidoscope, a peer-led mental health support group at UBC. He found comfort in meeting others in his age group who had gone through similar experiences and started promoting the society around campus.

During UBC’s Mental Health Symposium in early 2011, Beharry and a few other students founded the Mental Health Network to foster better communication amongst different groups including the UBC’s student government, the Alma Mater Society (AMS), counsellors and Kaleidoscope. He graduated later that year while working as coordinator of the network and eventually went public with his story by speaking at post-secondary schools around Vancouver. Last month his story was published in The Ubyssey student newspaper. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

The Mental Health Network recently received funding and staff support from the AMS that will ensure its survival and expansion. Beharry would like to see longer-term mental health assistance available on campus too. He says that more open discussion about suicide is needed.

Manisha Krishnan is an intern at Maclean’s. She previously worked at the Edmonton Journal and the North Shore News. Follow her on Twitter @ManishaKrishnan.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/education/uniandcollege/university-of-b-c-graduate-opens-up-about-suicide/feed/0Techno-McCarthyism and the death of Aaron Swartzhttp://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/techno-mccarthyism-and-the-death-of-aaron-swartz/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/techno-mccarthyism-and-the-death-of-aaron-swartz/#commentsMon, 14 Jan 2013 18:26:46 +0000Jesse Brownhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=336771Internet idealist fell victim to a misguided war over information

When I spoke to Aaron Swartz in 2009, he had just learned that he’d been investigated by the FBI for “stealing” public court documents from a library and sharing them on the Internet. They had a file on him. They had staked out his mom’s house. He thought it was hilarious.

“The whole thing strikes me as ridiculous,” he said of his FBI file, which he had obtained through a Freedom of Information request. “Suspect lives on a heavily wooded dead-end street,” he read in a super-serious Dragnet voice, “making continued surveillance difficult.”

“Who are you,” I asked, “Jason Bourne?”

Aaron laughed.

It was no joke. His brilliant PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) hack put him on the FBI’s radar and likely contributed to the persecution he suffered when he struck again.

Who could have known it at the time? The hack was so playful, and Aaron so decent and clever. PACER was experimenting with waiving its user fees and opening its archive with a pilot project at a handful of public libraries. Aaron thought that was a great idea, but why constrain it to just a few locations? These were public documents, paid for by the public for the benefit of the public. He said this:

“I feel that it’s our job, those of us on the outside, to keep pushing further and further and showing them more things that can be open and showing them how important it is to get things on the web.”

Aaron liberated 20 per cent of PACER before they caught him and shut down their pilot program. They accused him of stealing material worth $1.5 million, which is what it would have cost in user fees to obtain the 16 million documents. “I prefer to think that I saved the country $1.5 million dollars,” he told me. ”How can you steal something that’s free?” I asked.

“Stealing is stealing,” said U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, when she charged Aaron Swartz with 13 felonies for downloading too many scholarly articles. “Stealing is stealing,” she said, “whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.”

But it’s not, is it? When Aaron “stole,” nobody lost anything. When he “stole,” he didn’t gain anything. Insisting he may as well have been a thief with a crowbar, heisting cash, is more than a lie—it’s a wilful act of ignorance, backed by the power of the state—it’s a lie that, based on accounts from those closest to him, led to the death of Aaron Swartz

During the Red Scare, American authorities made a decision to ignore the differences between harmless idealists and violent enemies of the state. They crushed lives, smeared reputations and intimidated good people into killing themselves. The parallels between the past and present did not escape Aaron himself.

Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, Kim Dotcom, Gottfrid Svartholm, Aaron Swartz: they have little in common. Hacking the military is different from hacking a library. Sharing music is different from sharing state secrets. Authorities around the world, but particularly in the U.S., have decided to ignore these differences. Shocked and scared by their loss of control over information, they are waging a dumb, mean war against anyone who seems to be standing on the wrong side of an imaginary line. As Vic Toews said, you “either stand with us or with the child pornographers.”

Aaron Swartz would not be told where to stand. He was offered a settlement by Ortiz’s office, but it required him pleading guilty and living life as a felon. He refused, and killed himself two days later.

His suicide may or may not have been an act of desperation, but it was certainly an act of defiance.

When I read about Amanda Todd’s suicide, I was affected, not only because someone so young decided to take her life, but also because of how it reminded me of my own adolescence.

To the right is a photo of me at Todd’s age. By the time that picture was taken, I had been bullied practically every day for five years. It started with some older girls who thought my name, Ravanne, sounded funny. They would chase me, scream at me, and throw food at me. Although concerned classmates stood up for me, it never stopped.

As early as sixth grade, I was depressed and socially anxious. When I entered junior high school, I was afraid to talk to new people out of fear that they too would laugh at me. I did make some friends, but for every friend I made, at least two people would obsessively bully me.

At this point in time, I started to develop a fashion sense that was… different, to say the least. I would wear all black clothing, heavy eye makeup, and spiky hair. Classmates would follow me around calling me “Racoon Ravanne,” shove me into lockers, and tell me I should kill myself.

Even some parents and teachers mocked my appearance.

Eventually, I changed schools. Like Amanda Todd, things didn’t get much better there; new bullies were waiting around every corner to make the same jokes that the kids at my former school made. By this point, I had no self-esteem, few friends, and little hope for the future.

But then one day, things changed. The one good thing about my social isolation was the time it left me to focus on school. Although some teachers were a put off by my appearance and quietness, I was praised as a good student. I spent my days at home studying and got into university.

When I arrived at the University of Alberta, the atmosphere wasn’t much like high school. For the most part, people left me alone. For the first time, I felt free to do what I wanted, and free to be who I wanted to be. I started writing, interacting with people who shared my interests—and smiling again.

One day when I was sitting in the campus pub with some new and old friends, smiling and having a good time, it clicked for me that I truly belong here. Although I still have some depressing thoughts, I’m not suffering anymore. Instead, I’m overcoming the anxiety and fear I faced as a youth.

I could only imagine how many teens look at pictures of Amanda Todd and see themselves staring back. If this had happened four years ago, I would have been one of them. So it’s important for young people to know that suicide is not a good option, because as you get older, things get better.

At least, they did for me. They got better at university.

Ravanne Lawday is a second-year English student at the University of Alberta.

This week’s issue of Maclean’s took an in-depth look at the mental health crisis on university campuses. Read the story, check out our tips for dealing with stress and join the conversation on Twitter: #brokengeneration

In late August, as the first leaves changed from green to red and gold, university ghost towns were coming back to life. Residences were dusted out. Classrooms were readied. Textbooks were purchased—and new outfits, new computers, new posters to decorate dorm room walls. Amid this bustle, construction workers at Cornell University began installing steel mesh nets under seven bridges around campus. They overlook the scenic gorges for which Ithaca, N.Y., is known; in early 2010, they were the sites of three Cornell student suicides of a total of six that year. Students cross the bridges daily on their way to class.

Cornell’s bridge nets are the latest and most visible sign that the best and brightest are struggling. In an editorial in the Cornell Daily Sun following the 2010 suicides, president David J. Skorton acknowledged these deaths are just “the tip of the iceberg, indicative of a much larger spectrum of mental health challenges faced by many on our campus and on campuses everywhere.”

Last year, Ryerson University’s centre for student development and counselling in Toronto saw a 200 per cent increase in demand from students in crisis situations: “homeless, suicidal, really sick,” says Dr. Su-Ting Teo, director of student health and wellness. Colleagues at other schools noticed the same. “I’ve met with different key people. They’re saying last year was the worst they’ve ever seen,” says psychologist Gail Hutchinson, director of Western University’s student development centre in London. “The past few years, it’s been growing exponentially.” Fully a quarter of university-age Canadians will experience a mental health problem, most often stress, anxiety or depression.

One need only to look at the results of a 2011 survey of 1,600 University of Alberta students to know something is very wrong. About 51 per cent reported that, within the past 12 months, they’d “felt things were hopeless.” Over half felt “overwhelming anxiety.” A shocking seven per cent admitted they’d “seriously considered suicide,” and about one per cent had attempted it. These problems aren’t unique to U of A. “It’s across all of North America,” says Robin Everall, provost fellow for student mental health.

In March 2010, first-year Queen’s University student Jack Windeler died by suicide. “He did well in school, was active in sports, and we thought he was ultimately prepared to go to university,” his father, Eric Windeler, says. But Jack, who seems to have been suffering from depression, had begun withdrawing from friends. “It seemed to go amiss,” Windeler says, “and go amiss very fast.”

In the 14 months that followed, five more Queen’s students (all male) died suddenly, three by suicide. “It was a very difficult period,” says Queen’s principal Daniel Woolf. In the wake of these deaths, he established a commission on mental health to see what could be done. Its panel of five members—two administrators, the head of the school of nursing, one student, and chair Dr. David Walker, former health sciences dean—met once a week for eight months, and heard from students, parents and others.

The Queen’s commission was, in some ways, influenced by Cornell’s experience. That university has grappled with the label of “suicide school,” a reputation Tim Marchell, director of mental health initiatives, acknowledges, but insists is a misperception. Cornell’s student suicide rate resembles that of other universities and colleges across the U.S. What’s different is that at Cornell, nearly half of suicides occurred at the city’s public gorges. The fact is Cornell’s mental health initiatives have been a model to other schools. Cornell’s bridge nets are just a small, if highly visible, part of its overall mental health strategy—an effort aimed at restricting access in case of impulsive suicides, not unlike keeping firearms locked inside a cabinet.

At Queen’s, a final report from the commission is due in October. A discussion paper, delivered in June, offered a range of reasons students are grappling with mental health problems: everything from the stress of moving away from home, to academic demands, social pressures, parents’ expectations, and a looming recognition of the tough job market awaiting them. More students than ever are entering university with a pre-existing diagnosis of mental illness, and there’s less stigma attached to getting help. This partly explains the flood that counsellors are seeing. But there’s something else going on, too. Some wonder if today’s students are having difficulty coping with the rapidly changing world around them, a world where they can’t unplug, can’t relax, and believe they must stay at the top of their class, no matter what.

The stress of it all is a huge burden to bear. In preliminary findings from an unpublished study involving several U.S. schools, Cornell psychologist Janis Whitlock found 7.5 per cent of students who started university with no history of mental illness developed some symptoms. About five per cent who did have a previous history of mental illness saw symptoms increase while at university. She says, “there’s probably never been a more complicated time to be growing up than right now.”

The truth is, it’s never been easy to be young. People in their late teens and early twenties are at the highest risk for mental illness; in these years, first episodes of psychiatric disorders like major depression are most likely to appear. After motor vehicle accidents, suicide is the leading cause of death in Canadians aged 10 to 24, the Queen’s report notes. In this delicate life period, people move out on their own, strike up new relationships, experiment with drugs and alcohol, and assume new responsibilities. At college or university, they could be away from friends and family who know them best—people who might better recognize the warning signs of mental illness, like social withdrawal, increasing anxiety, a growing inability to cope, or other changes in behaviour.

If some pressures are age-old, others are brand new. Students are competing more fiercely to win a spot in top universities: the average grade of incoming students at Queen’s in 2011 was 88.1 per cent, up from 87.4 in 2007. At the University of Virginia, 90 per cent of students are from the top 10 per cent of their high school classes, according to Joseph Davis, associate professor of sociology. But only 10 per cent of those high achievers can leave UVA with the same distinction. “Students experience it as a kind of downward mobility,” he says. “Maybe you were in your high school gifted program, and suddenly you’re no longer the brightest student in the room. You might not even be close.”

Davis’s student Katherine Moriarty surveyed UVA undergrads about the illegal use of prescription stimulants, like Adderall and Ritalin, to get an academic edge. Of 525 respondents, 20 per cent said they’d used stimulants non-medically at least once in their lifetimes, most commonly to “improve academic performance,” “study more efficiently” and “increase wakefulness.” Other motives—recreational use at parties, or weight loss—were deemed less important than academic ones.

Students might feel they have little choice but to compete as hard as they can. Tuition costs are rising, and the job market looks grim. In July, the unemployment rate for Canadians aged 15 to 29 was nearly 12 per cent; having an undergraduate degree doesn’t make job candidates stand out like it once did. After graduation, often weighed down by student debt, many will have to string together short-term contracts with unpaid internships—and even those can be hard to get. “Students say, ‘I need to know what I’m doing now,’ ” Hutchinson says. “ ‘I need to get into this or that program, because the world is scary and I see people out of work.’ ”

The postings to Kids Help Phone’s Ask Us Online counselling service give a hint of how dire the future can seem. “Im a 2nd year University student and the #1 thing that has been on my mind is marks!” one writes. “im worried that im not going to be able to get into teachers college and if I dont get into teachers college I really dont know what to do! In High School I was an overachiever but now in the real world it is more of a challenge! Things just seem so hopeless right now and I can barely sleep because of the stress.”

Another says, “My parents want me to become a doctor. My mom puts a lot of pressure on me. I have chemistry which I dislike, although I loved it in high school. I’m not sure why that is, maybe it’s because it has become much harder, and im so use to just ‘getting it’ that i dont feel like putting the extra effort, even though i know i should.” Students seem to be under more pressure than ever from home. Part of it could be due to the fact that families are smaller, Hutchinson suggests, so students carry a bigger piece of their parents’ expectations. Failing a class, or an exam, can seem disastrous.

Miranda struggled with depression most of her life. When she moved to Toronto to attend Ryerson, the 22-year-old (who asked not to use her last name for fear it could jeopardize her chances with future employers) found her symptoms worsening. By her second year, she was suffering from more frequent panic attacks. “I realized I was struggling, and tried to reach out for help, but [Ryerson’s is] a very widely utilized program,” she says. “There was a very, very long wait list. They do their best to find you help, but in the rest of the city, wait lists are just as long.”

Miranda was eventually referred to a counsellor at St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Toronto, but didn’t feel she was improving. Halfway through her third year, Miranda—who’d been living with a roommate—moved into her own place. “My mental health issues peaked the first summer I lived by myself,” she says. “I got bedbugs, and that was it.” She packed up and moved in with her grandparents. Finally, afraid she might hurt herself, she went to the ER and was held in a psychiatric intensive-care unit for eight days. “The resources at Ryerson weren’t helping,” she says. “That seemed like the best option.”

Ryerson has three full-time equivalent (FTE) family physicians and half an FTE psychiatrist, Teo says, as well as 14 counsellors, three of them psychologists. (After last year’s demand, two more counsellors were added.) With such a small staff, and a student body of 28,300, it’s no wonder on-campus mental health care resources can feel stretched to the limit. (Cornell has 30.6 FTE mental health professionals to serve 22,000 students.) At Ryerson, those in crisis can usually see somebody the same day “or the next at the latest,” Teo says. “If you’re not as urgent, that’s when the wait comes in.” The goal is to get each student an appointment within two weeks, says Teo, “but last year, because of the level of severity, the wait became much longer. Maybe three or four times as long.”

After Miranda got out of the hospital, and as she adjusted to new medication, her family helped her get back on her feet. She graduated from Ryerson in the spring. She’s now working an unpaid internship, hoping to land a job in communications. “It’s as promising as it is terrifying. There’s so much unknown,” she says. “Not knowing where your next paycheque is going to come from; working 60 hours a week. A lot of people I know, whether they have mental health issues or not, have trouble balancing it all.” She sometimes sits outside her building, chatting with older women who live on her street. “They say, ‘We wouldn’t trade with you to be young again.’ ”

Some problems are the natural ups and downs of life, like a bad mark or a sloppy roommate. There’s a question of whether today’s young adults are somehow less equipped to cope. “Not all pressures can be removed,” says Woolf, principal of Queen’s. “There is pressure just by going to university, or doing anything in life.” When he was in university in the 1970s, he recalls, students didn’t fret so much about their marks, or employment prospects after graduation.

“If we got a bad mark, it was ‘Too bad, on to the next one,’ ” Woolf says. “There’s a generation of students now—and I’m not saying it’s every student—but a tendency to want to be a winner in all that they do. They all get a trophy at field day; they all get a treat bag at the party; and then they get to university and suddenly find they’re now playing in a different league, and no longer necessarily the smartest in their class.” Woolf is quick to note that serious, long-term mental health struggles are a different matter.

The ability to cope is an acquired skill, and one that takes time to learn. “I speak to parents who insist their children not take summer jobs so they can go to summer school, to get the best marks,” says Trent University psychology professor James Parker, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Emotion and Health. “I say, ‘I’m not sure that’s the best strategy.’ ” It’s often at those summer jobs that kids learn resiliency: serving coffee, waiting on tables and dealing with demanding bosses and crabby customers. Overprotective parents may think they’re helping their kids, but once these kids arrive on campus, small problems can seem overwhelming.

Getting over the hurdles of life takes time for introspection, and that’s also in short supply. Students aren’t left alone with their thoughts on the bus to school or the walk across campus. They’re texting, listening to music, checking Facebook or Twitter, often all at once. There’s no time to mull over difficult, complicated emotions, and no immediate reason to do it, either.

In a 2011 study of eight U.S. universities, Whitlock, who is director of the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injurious Behaviors, found that 15 per cent of students had cut, burned or otherwise injured themselves. This behaviour is most common at the end of the day, when they’re supposed to be winding down into sleep. “It’s terrifying for them,” Whitlock says. “They can’t make that transition. They don’t have experience with it.”

Mariette Lee couldn’t wait to become a student at McMaster University in Hamilton. Toward the end of her second year, she began to feel overwhelmed. “I was trying to do too much simultaneously, to be the perfect student,” says Lee, 22. She began skipping class, and she wasn’t eating right; she became increasingly withdrawn, gripped by sadness or anxiety for reasons she couldn’t understand. “I remember sitting in class, and a whole hour would go by without me realizing it.” It wasn’t until a friend reached out to her—one who said he himself had a mental illness—that Lee understood she needed to talk to someone.

Lee got help, first at the campus health clinic, and then at St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton. She was diagnosed with depression. At first, Lee was shy about sharing her diagnosis, but once she saw others were supportive, she opened up. “If people don’t talk about it, they won’t recognize the signs,” she says. Lee, who’s beginning her fourth year, is now president of COPE McMaster, a student club. This fall, they’re holding their first-ever “Move for Mental Health” five-kilometre run, with the purpose of speaking openly about depression and other mood disorders.

Student-run mental health programs are an increasingly important resource. At the University of King’s College in Halifax, Stephanie Duchon, 23, appears on posters that say, “I am not my mental illness.” Duchon, an organizer with the King’s Mental Health Awareness Collective, came up with the idea. “I’ve suffered from depression for 12 years,” she says. “By coming out to the community, I’m hoping others will do the same.”

Alongside students’ own efforts, university administrators are introducing an ever-growing number of programs. Queen’s, Cornell and others instruct faculty and staff on how to look for warning signs that could signal a student in crisis, making it a campus-wide effort. The Queen’s report mentions initiatives at other institutions as possible models, like Bounce Back, at Carleton University, which sets up undergrads who receive less than a 60 per cent average in their first semester with an upper-year mentor. Teo, of Ryerson, sits on the board of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services, which has a mental health working group, partnered with the Canadian Mental Health Association, to study best practices in Canada and abroad. And Everall, at the University of Alberta, is producing a report on campus mental health services and best practices elsewhere, due in 2013.

Universities are still trying to define their exact role when it comes to students’ mental health. “We are not a treatment facility,” Woolf says. “Our role is education and research, and to some degree, community service. That said, we do have a care and nurturing role over the young people that come to us.” Eric Windeler believes that mental health and well-being of students should rank alongside academics. “If students are healthy and happy, it will help them succeed academically and socially,” he says.

Following Jack’s death, Windeler and his family made a decision: to be open about what happened and to encourage others to seek help. They partnered with Kids Help Phone to launch the Jack Project, aimed at supporting young people through the transition period from high school to college. Over 20 high schools and 12 post-secondary institutions in Ontario joined in the Jack Project’s year-long pilot, involving a series of workshops and presentations, which wrapped up in June. Windeler is a full-time volunteer.

As he and others, like Lee and Duchon, come forward, the stigma around mental health issues can only diminish. In her work with COPE McMaster, Lee has been surprised to learn just how many people have struggled, but didn’t admit it, or couldn’t. “When we run events, people say, ‘Thank you, I never would have felt comfortable before talking about this,’ ” Lee says. “It does feel good.”

In late August, as the first leaves changed from green to red and gold, university ghost towns were coming back to life. Residences were dusted out. Classrooms were readied. Textbooks were purchased—and new outfits, new computers, new posters to decorate dorm room walls. Amid this bustle, construction workers at Cornell University began installing steel mesh nets under seven bridges around campus. They overlook the scenic gorges for which Ithaca, N.Y., is known; in early 2010, they were the sites of three Cornell student suicides of a total of six that year. Students cross the bridges daily on their way to class.

Cornell’s bridge nets are the latest and most visible sign that the best and brightest are struggling. In an editorial in the Cornell Daily Sun following the 2010 suicides, president David J. Skorton acknowledged these deaths are just “the tip of the iceberg, indicative of a much larger spectrum of mental health challenges faced by many on our campus and on campuses everywhere.”

Last year, Ryerson University’s centre for student development and counselling in Toronto saw a 200 per cent increase in demand from students in crisis situations: “homeless, suicidal, really sick,” says Dr. Su-Ting Teo, director of student health and wellness. Colleagues at other schools noticed the same. “I’ve met with different key people. They’re saying last year was the worst they’ve ever seen,” says psychologist Gail Hutchinson, director of Western University’s student development centre in London. “The past few years, it’s been growing exponentially.” Fully a quarter of university-age Canadians will experience a mental health problem, most often stress, anxiety or depression.

One need only to look at the results of a 2011 survey of 1,600 University of Alberta students to know something is very wrong. About 51 per cent reported that, within the past 12 months, they’d “felt things were hopeless.” Over half felt “overwhelming anxiety.” A shocking seven per cent admitted they’d “seriously considered suicide,” and about one per cent had attempted it. These problems aren’t unique to U of A. “It’s across all of North America,” says Robin Everall, provost fellow for student mental health.

In March 2010, first-year Queen’s University student Jack Windeler died by suicide. “He did well in school, was active in sports, and we thought he was ultimately prepared to go to university,” his father, Eric Windeler, says. But Jack, who seems to have been suffering from depression, had begun withdrawing from friends. “It seemed to go amiss,” Windeler says, “and go amiss very fast.”

In the 14 months that followed, five more Queen’s students (all male) died suddenly, three by suicide. “It was a very difficult period,” says Queen’s principal Daniel Woolf. In the wake of these deaths, he established a commission on mental health to see what could be done. Its panel of five members—two administrators, the head of the school of nursing, one student, and chair Dr. David Walker, former health sciences dean—met once a week for eight months, and heard from students, parents and others.

The Queen’s commission was, in some ways, influenced by Cornell’s experience. That university has grappled with the label of “suicide school,” a reputation Tim Marchell, director of mental health initiatives, acknowledges, but insists is a misperception. Cornell’s student suicide rate resembles that of other universities and colleges across the U.S. What’s different is that at Cornell, nearly half of suicides occurred at the city’s public gorges. The fact is Cornell’s mental health initiatives have been a model to other schools. Cornell’s bridge nets are just a small, if highly visible, part of its overall mental health strategy—an effort aimed at restricting access in case of impulsive suicides, not unlike keeping firearms locked inside a cabinet.

At Queen’s, a final report from the commission is due in October. A discussion paper, delivered in June, offered a range of reasons students are grappling with mental health problems: everything from the stress of moving away from home, to academic demands, social pressures, parents’ expectations, and a looming recognition of the tough job market awaiting them. More students than ever are entering university with a pre-existing diagnosis of mental illness, and there’s less stigma attached to getting help. This partly explains the flood that counsellors are seeing. But there’s something else going on, too. Some wonder if today’s students are having difficulty coping with the rapidly changing world around them, a world where they can’t unplug, can’t relax, and believe they must stay at the top of their class, no matter what.

The stress of it all is a huge burden to bear. In preliminary findings from an unpublished study involving several U.S. schools, Cornell psychologist Janis Whitlock found 7.5 per cent of students who started university with no history of mental illness developed some symptoms. About five per cent who did have a previous history of mental illness saw symptoms increase while at university. She says, “there’s probably never been a more complicated time to be growing up than right now.”

The truth is, it’s never been easy to be young. People in their late teens and early twenties are at the highest risk for mental illness; in these years, first episodes of psychiatric disorders like major depression are most likely to appear. After motor vehicle accidents, suicide is the leading cause of death in Canadians aged 10 to 24, the Queen’s report notes. In this delicate life period, people move out on their own, strike up new relationships, experiment with drugs and alcohol, and assume new responsibilities. At college or university, they could be away from friends and family who know them best—people who might better recognize the warning signs of mental illness, like social withdrawal, increasing anxiety, a growing inability to cope, or other changes in behaviour.

If some pressures are age-old, others are brand new. Students are competing more fiercely to win a spot in top universities: the average grade of incoming students at Queen’s in 2011 was 88.1 per cent, up from 87.4 in 2007. At the University of Virginia, 90 per cent of students are from the top 10 per cent of their high school classes, according to Joseph Davis, associate professor of sociology. But only 10 per cent of those high achievers can leave UVA with the same distinction. “Students experience it as a kind of downward mobility,” he says. “Maybe you were in your high school gifted program, and suddenly you’re no longer the brightest student in the room. You might not even be close.”

Davis’s student Katherine Moriarty surveyed UVA undergrads about the illegal use of prescription stimulants, like Adderall and Ritalin, to get an academic edge. Of 525 respondents, 20 per cent said they’d used stimulants non-medically at least once in their lifetimes, most commonly to “improve academic performance,” “study more efficiently” and “increase wakefulness.” Other motives—recreational use at parties, or weight loss—were deemed less important than academic ones.

Students might feel they have little choice but to compete as hard as they can. Tuition costs are rising, and the job market looks grim. In July, the unemployment rate for Canadians aged 15 to 29 was nearly 12 per cent; having an undergraduate degree doesn’t make job candidates stand out like it once did. After graduation, often weighed down by student debt, many will have to string together short-term contracts with unpaid internships—and even those can be hard to get. “Students say, ‘I need to know what I’m doing now,’ ” Hutchinson says. “ ‘I need to get into this or that program, because the world is scary and I see people out of work.’ ”

The postings to Kids Help Phone’s Ask Us Online counselling service give a hint of how dire the future can seem. “Im a 2nd year University student and the #1 thing that has been on my mind is marks!” one writes. “im worried that im not going to be able to get into teachers college and if I dont get into teachers college I really dont know what to do! In High School I was an overachiever but now in the real world it is more of a challenge! Things just seem so hopeless right now and I can barely sleep because of the stress.”

Another says, “My parents want me to become a doctor. My mom puts a lot of pressure on me. I have chemistry which I dislike, although I loved it in high school. I’m not sure why that is, maybe it’s because it has become much harder, and im so use to just ‘getting it’ that i dont feel like putting the extra effort, even though i know i should.” Students seem to be under more pressure than ever from home. Part of it could be due to the fact that families are smaller, Hutchinson suggests, so students carry a bigger piece of their parents’ expectations. Failing a class, or an exam, can seem disastrous.

Miranda struggled with depression most of her life. When she moved to Toronto to attend Ryerson, the 22-year-old (who asked not to use her last name for fear it could jeopardize her chances with future employers) found her symptoms worsening. By her second year, she was suffering from more frequent panic attacks. “I realized I was struggling, and tried to reach out for help, but [Ryerson’s is] a very widely utilized program,” she says. “There was a very, very long wait list. They do their best to find you help, but in the rest of the city, wait lists are just as long.”

Miranda was eventually referred to a counsellor at St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Toronto, but didn’t feel she was improving. Halfway through her third year, Miranda—who’d been living with a roommate—moved into her own place. “My mental health issues peaked the first summer I lived by myself,” she says. “I got bedbugs, and that was it.” She packed up and moved in with her grandparents. Finally, afraid she might hurt herself, she went to the ER and was held in a psychiatric intensive-care unit for eight days. “The resources at Ryerson weren’t helping,” she says. “That seemed like the best option.”

Ryerson has three full-time equivalent (FTE) family physicians and half an FTE psychiatrist, Teo says, as well as 14 counsellors, three of them psychologists. (After last year’s demand, two more counsellors were added.) With such a small staff, and a student body of 28,300, it’s no wonder on-campus mental health care resources can feel stretched to the limit. (Cornell has 30.6 FTE mental health professionals to serve 22,000 students.) At Ryerson, those in crisis can usually see somebody the same day “or the next at the latest,” Teo says. “If you’re not as urgent, that’s when the wait comes in.” The goal is to get each student an appointment within two weeks, says Teo, “but last year, because of the level of severity, the wait became much longer. Maybe three or four times as long.”

After Miranda got out of the hospital, and as she adjusted to new medication, her family helped her get back on her feet. She graduated from Ryerson in the spring. She’s now working an unpaid internship, hoping to land a job in communications. “It’s as promising as it is terrifying. There’s so much unknown,” she says. “Not knowing where your next paycheque is going to come from; working 60 hours a week. A lot of people I know, whether they have mental health issues or not, have trouble balancing it all.” She sometimes sits outside her building, chatting with older women who live on her street. “They say, ‘We wouldn’t trade with you to be young again.’ ”

Some problems are the natural ups and downs of life, like a bad mark or a sloppy roommate. There’s a question of whether today’s young adults are somehow less equipped to cope. “Not all pressures can be removed,” says Woolf, principal of Queen’s. “There is pressure just by going to university, or doing anything in life.” When he was in university in the 1970s, he recalls, students didn’t fret so much about their marks, or employment prospects after graduation.

“If we got a bad mark, it was ‘Too bad, on to the next one,’ ” Woolf says. “There’s a generation of students now—and I’m not saying it’s every student—but a tendency to want to be a winner in all that they do. They all get a trophy at field day; they all get a treat bag at the party; and then they get to university and suddenly find they’re now playing in a different league, and no longer necessarily the smartest in their class.” Woolf is quick to note that serious, long-term mental health struggles are a different matter.

The ability to cope is an acquired skill, and one that takes time to learn. “I speak to parents who insist their children not take summer jobs so they can go to summer school, to get the best marks,” says Trent University psychology professor James Parker, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Emotion and Health. “I say, ‘I’m not sure that’s the best strategy.’ ” It’s often at those summer jobs that kids learn resiliency: serving coffee, waiting on tables and dealing with demanding bosses and crabby customers. Overprotective parents may think they’re helping their kids, but once these kids arrive on campus, small problems can seem overwhelming.

Getting over the hurdles of life takes time for introspection, and that’s also in short supply. Students aren’t left alone with their thoughts on the bus to school or the walk across campus. They’re texting, listening to music, checking Facebook or Twitter, often all at once. There’s no time to mull over difficult, complicated emotions, and no immediate reason to do it, either.

In a 2011 study of eight U.S. universities, Whitlock, who is director of the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injurious Behaviors, found that 15 per cent of students had cut, burned or otherwise injured themselves. This behaviour is most common at the end of the day, when they’re supposed to be winding down into sleep. “It’s terrifying for them,” Whitlock says. “They can’t make that transition. They don’t have experience with it.”

Mariette Lee couldn’t wait to become a student at McMaster University in Hamilton. Toward the end of her second year, she began to feel overwhelmed. “I was trying to do too much simultaneously, to be the perfect student,” says Lee, 22. She began skipping class, and she wasn’t eating right; she became increasingly withdrawn, gripped by sadness or anxiety for reasons she couldn’t understand. “I remember sitting in class, and a whole hour would go by without me realizing it.” It wasn’t until a friend reached out to her—one who said he himself had a mental illness—that Lee understood she needed to talk to someone.

Lee got help, first at the campus health clinic, and then at St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton. She was diagnosed with depression. At first, Lee was shy about sharing her diagnosis, but once she saw others were supportive, she opened up. “If people don’t talk about it, they won’t recognize the signs,” she says. Lee, who’s beginning her fourth year, is now president of COPE McMaster, a student club. This fall, they’re holding their first-ever “Move for Mental Health” five-kilometre run, with the purpose of speaking openly about depression and other mood disorders.

Student-run mental health programs are an increasingly important resource. At the University of King’s College in Halifax, Stephanie Duchon, 23, appears on posters that say, “I am not my mental illness.” Duchon, an organizer with the King’s Mental Health Awareness Collective, came up with the idea. “I’ve suffered from depression for 12 years,” she says. “By coming out to the community, I’m hoping others will do the same.”

Alongside students’ own efforts, university administrators are introducing an ever-growing number of programs. Queen’s, Cornell and others instruct faculty and staff on how to look for warning signs that could signal a student in crisis, making it a campus-wide effort. The Queen’s report mentions initiatives at other institutions as possible models, like Bounce Back, at Carleton University, which sets up undergrads who receive less than a 60 per cent average in their first semester with an upper-year mentor. Teo, of Ryerson, sits on the board of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services, which has a mental health working group, partnered with the Canadian Mental Health Association, to study best practices in Canada and abroad. And Everall, at the University of Alberta, is producing a report on campus mental health services and best practices elsewhere, due in 2013.

Universities are still trying to define their exact role when it comes to students’ mental health. “We are not a treatment facility,” Woolf says. “Our role is education and research, and to some degree, community service. That said, we do have a care and nurturing role over the young people that come to us.” Eric Windeler believes that mental health and well-being of students should rank alongside academics. “If students are healthy and happy, it will help them succeed academically and socially,” he says.

Following Jack’s death, Windeler and his family made a decision: to be open about what happened and to encourage others to seek help. They partnered with Kids Help Phone to launch the Jack Project, aimed at supporting young people through the transition period from high school to college. Over 20 high schools and 12 post-secondary institutions in Ontario joined in the Jack Project’s year-long pilot, involving a series of workshops and presentations, which wrapped up in June. Windeler is a full-time volunteer.

As he and others, like Lee and Duchon, come forward, the stigma around mental health issues can only diminish. In her work with COPE McMaster, Lee has been surprised to learn just how many people have struggled, but didn’t admit it, or couldn’t. “When we run events, people say, ‘Thank you, I never would have felt comfortable before talking about this,’ ” Lee says. “It does feel good.”

Mental health on campus

In 2011, 1,600 University of Alberta students took part in the National College Health Assessment survey. The problems students identified are playing out across the country.

When the City of Toronto installed a suicide barrier at the Prince Edward Viaduct, the bridge went from being the world’s second-deadliest suicide site, with almost 500 fatal jumps since 1918, to none at all.

Such success stories cause Bateson to seethe. The head of a Bay-area suicide-prevention centre, he has written the first book ever published about the world’s No. 1 deadliest suicide site, the Golden Gate Bridge, where 1,500 people have died jumping since 1937. What makes him angry is efforts to erect a barrier there stretch back almost to its first confirmed suicide: Harold Wobber, a First World War vet who, weeks after it opened, walked halfway across and told someone: “This is as far as I go.” Seventy years later, there’s still no barrier.

The drop is 25 storeys, a distance jumpers traverse in four seconds. The odds of surviving are “roughly the same as surviving a gunshot to your head,” Bateson writes, meaning some jumpers don’t die immediately. “Upon hitting the water their bones shatter, their body organs burst, they plunge deep beneath the surface, and ultimately they drown.” (In rare cases survivors live much longer.)

The mysteries abound: the doctor who jumps despite the surprise party he’s planned for his fiancée; a man whose suicide note reads: “Do not notify my mother. She has a heart condition”; “Absolutely no reason except I have a toothache,” reads another. One man holds his hat to his head as he plummets; another jumps in front of a troop of Girl Scouts. Then there’s the Rev. Jim Jones rallying for a suicide barrier in 1977, months before the Jonestown Kool-Aid tragedy.

Bateson notes the bridge is the only landmark of its kind without a barrier—the Eiffel Tower, Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Empire State Building have all been equipped. Yet its governing body hesitates, largely, it seems, because they fear a barrier will be ugly, expensive, and that people will kill themselves some other way.

Yet Bateson believes the Golden Gate Bridge exerts a powerful force—“a fatal lure.” The father of a jumper tells him it “fosters the myth of the perfect death.” A barrier wouldn’t divert these deaths, he argues; it would stop many completely.

We live in the age of memoir. If you eat, pray or love, chances are there’s a story you can sell. The publishing landscape is littered with non-fiction tales powered by that reliable fictional device – plot. But is this a proper reflection of reality? The way we experience the world is much more fragmented, more crammed with idle and mundane thoughts that constantly interrupt our generally plotless lives.

Nobody understood this better than the late French writer Edouard Levé. In Autoportrait, originally published in France in 2005 and recently translated by Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, Levé bluntly acknowledges this fact. In a single book-length paragraph, Levé lays himself bare with 1,500 highly personal, yet completely non-sequential declarations.

Phobias, admissions, curiosities: the randomness not only mimics the way our minds work, but also makes for pure, compulsive reading. A single page can careen from the metaphysical (“I wonder whether the landscape is shaped by the road, or the road by the landscape”) to the political (“I vote for the Green party even though they rarely put forward a candidate I like”) to the sexual (“I do not foresee making love with an animal”).

Levé’s dry, direct tone can verge on the aphoristic (“Names draw me to places, bodies draw me to people”) or just plain odd (“I think the big toe is doomed to disappear”). No detail is too small (“I do not like bananas”) nor too quotidian (“I love the unpredictability of blue jeans: how, after you wash them, they shrink, age, fade”). These are the meanderings that make up a life.

Levé, a critical darling in France, was a strident conceptual artist. The rigourously formal approach of his prose was also evident in his photography. The pictures in Pornographie (2002) reduce brazen to bland by depicting fully-clothed people in static sexual poses, while Série Amérique (2006) collects snaps of small United States towns that are notable for their more exotic namesakes: Baghdad, Rome, Rio.

But it is in his writing that Levé was able to push his love of conceit to its ultimate degree. His last book, Suicide, is written to an old friend who killed himself two decades earlier. Suicide, termed a novel, presumably due to the attribution of his friend’s thoughts that Levé couldn’t possibly have known, is nonetheless kin to Autoportrait. Both are unflinchingly personal, and their unadorned sentences are deadpan in tone.

They differ, however, in point of view. Suicide is told in the second person (“You used to believe in written things regardless of whether they were true or false”). The use of “You” makes the book read like a love letter to a dear dead friend, but the second person address can also seem like an invocation of the self. This is a slippery “You” that helps the reader sidestep an awful truth: Levé hanged himself ten days after handing in the manuscript for Suicide.

It’s always dangerous to interpret fiction as biography, but the sensational nature of Levé’s suicide invites some contemplation: is it so unimaginable that such a thoroughly conceptual writer would plot out Suicide and suicide?

Perhaps. But if he did, then there’s a twist that even the author couldn’t have envisioned. In France, Autoportrait came out first and Suicide, two years later in 2007; in North America, the order was reversed. We read the suicide note first, the self-depiction second.

This quirk of publishing gives Levé a beatific glow as his obsessive attention to detail gains beautiful weight. He observes and records what he will eventually destroy. Despite this morbid truth, Levé has given us a fully realized life.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/autoportrait-a-memoir-edouard-leve-style/feed/1Canada, home to the suicide capital of the worldhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/canada-home-to-the-suicide-capital-of-the-world/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/canada-home-to-the-suicide-capital-of-the-world/#commentsFri, 30 Mar 2012 05:06:01 +0000Martin Patriquinhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=248870In Pikangikum, gas sniffing is rampant and young people are taking their own lives at a shocking rate.

Randy Keeper is sick of building coffins. A wiry fellow who looks younger than his 49 years, Keeper is proud of his job as a carpenter and crew leader, saying he’s built 25 houses from scratch over 17 years in Pikangikum, the reserve in northwestern Ontario where he has lived his whole life. But when it comes to the wooden boxes he builds for Pikangikum’s dead, he draws a blank. “I don’t count them,” he says from his daughter’s dining room table. He remembers the last ones, though. They were in December. “I had to make two in one day, one for an elder and one for a younger person.”

The dreams started a couple of weeks after that. In one, he’s lying face up in a freshly dug grave, watching as a coffin is slowly lowered toward him. He doesn’t know if there’s anyone inside, but he recognizes his handiwork: 100 lb. of plywood, treated pine and nails, a simple enough thing that takes him no more than 90 minutes to build. In the dream he’s alive but can’t move as it comes down on his chest, smothering him. Then he wakes up. “The elders told me to stop making them,” he says, “but I have no choice because I work for the band. I get nervous, shaky. Once the dreams happened I’d say yes out of respect for chief and council, but sometimes I don’t show up.”

Keeper is in high demand. Pikangikum, a fly-in reserve located about 300 km northeast of Winnipeg, is a place constantly haunted by the spectre of suicide. Over nearly four decades, the people of Pikangikum have seen dozens upon dozens of their friends and family members take their own lives. Last year, six people from the Ojibwa First Nations community killed themselves in as many weeks. In 2011, the community of roughly 2,400 had a suicide rate equivalent to 250 per 100,000—nearly 20 times that of Canada, and far and away the highest in the world. It has been so for 20 nearly uninterrupted years.

In recent months, the Attawapiskat reserve on James Bay served as a reminder of the deplorable conditions in many of Canada’s native communities. The lack of adequate housing in the frigid temperatures, followed by an acrimonious funding fight with the federal government, has kept the James Bay reserve of 1,800 in the public eye for months—a rare feat when it comes to native issues.

Separated by 500 km of northern Ontario wilderness, Attawapiskat and Pikangikum both suffer from a raft of structural and social problems: lack of housing and running water, addiction and poverty. Yet a glance at the numbers suggests Pikangikum is worse off—much worse. Consider how 80 per cent of its housing doesn’t have sewage pipes or running water; consider how the community of 2,400 had just over 3,600 lockups and nearly 5,000 calls for service to police last year. Consider how only two students graduated from high school last year. Consider how, as recently as 2008, fully 40 per cent of referrals to Tikinagan, northern Ontario’s First Nations childhood protection agency, were from Pikangikum. And consider the suicides, which have taken 96 lives—the vast majority of them young—in 20 years.

And yet there is a strange kind of optimism in Pikangikum these days. For all of its troubles (and after 14 years of negotiations), Pikangikum is where Whitefeather, a Canadian First Nations-owned company, will receive a licence to harvest the roughly 1.3 million hectares of the area’s surrounding forest—the first such project of its kind, according to the band and the federal government, with the local community reaping the benefits. Whitefeather is Pikangikum’s hope amidst its misery, a beacon in the suicide capital of the world.

Evenings are busy in Pikangikum. Families drive to and from the Northern Store, the only (official) place to buy anything, mostly in big, lumbering pick-up trucks. The view along the way is breathless: a brilliant sun dips toward a tree-topped horizon, lighting up the sky and reflecting off snow-covered Pikangikum Lake. Kids play hockey on a patch of cleared ice, and vehicles zoom off the ice road toward the town of Red Lake, about 100 km away. The air is so cold it’s dizzying.

I meet Jerry Strang on the 15-minute walk from the Northern Store to Pikangikum’s only hotel. Within 90 seconds, the rail-thin man in knee-high insulated boots is telling me unprompted how he lost his wife, a girlfriend and his boy to suicide. “I guess I got him mad,” Strang says. “He hung himself in the clubhouse he built. He was a carpenter like me, always used to steal my nails.” He’d like to meet someone else, but is afraid of the consequences. Then Jerry turns to me and smiles. “My sister says I’m cursed, you know?”

Death has long been part of Pikangikum’s landscape. The community’s dead are buried in the yards of family members, an Ojibwa tradition. Crosses draped with necklaces, caps, sneakers and other personal effects of the departed peek out of the snow. The ubiquity of these sites is a relatively new phenomenon, however. Though Pikangikum’s first reported suicide occurred in 1976, according to the 2002 documentary Back To Pikangikum, it remained a relatively isolated practice until the advent of gas sniffing in the 1990s. Three people killed themselves in 1992, and another three in 1993. There were eight in 1994, and a total of 27 between 1995 and 2000. At that time, British sociologist Colin Samson, reflecting on these last suicides, said Pikangikum likely has the highest suicide rate in the world. In April 2001, following several more suicide deaths, then Indian Affairs Minister Robert Nault appointed a third-party manager to oversee the band’s finances for what he described as “social reasons,” suggesting the band wasn’t able to handle its finances and the rash of suicides on the reserve. The band wouldn’t comply with the government, which in turn withheld funding. The school and Northern Store closed. A federal court later found that Nault had abused his powers.

An Ontario “death review,” undertaken by the province’s coroner’s office after 16 youth took their own lives between 2006 and 2008, noted similarities in these deaths. They happened in so-called “clusters”; most of the victims were under the age of 15; none had sought professional help in the month leading up to their deaths; most had family lives rife with substance and domestic abuse; few went to school. One thing was consistent across them all: they all died at the end of a rope. Almost all of them were solvent abusers, and had suffered some sort of calamity, like a friend’s suicide, or something as seemingly benign as a breakup. “I think most of the people who have committed suicide have been dumped by boyfriends or girlfriends,” Shanice Quill, a quiet 17-year-old with glasses and a shy gaze, writes in a note to me on the day I sit in on a class. (She’s that shy.) And yet Quill has a fierce attachment to this place, and, like many of the students I met, would never contemplate leaving, regardless of its miseries. “I would never move to the city because I would miss my family,” she writes. “I like the fresh air here because I can breathe and whenever I’m in the city like Winnipeg I feel as if I want to be home.”

On July 15, 2011, a pick-up truck flipped on Nungesser Road in Pikangikum, killing 39-year-old Kevin Suggashie, a community organizer popular with many Pikangikum youth, and his wife, Ibena. That night, after 16 suicide-free months, a 16-year-old girl killed herself; another 16-year-old girl did the same 20 days later. In the six weeks following that, two women and two men took their own lives. Suggashie himself had spoken often of his own suicidal thoughts, likening the practice to “a person, a spirit,” as he told the Canadian Press in 2000. The belief that such nefarious spirits—Windigos, as they are known in Ojibwa—roam northwestern Ontario is rooted in its history.

Matthew Strang (no relation to Jerry—almost the entire population of Pikangikum shares just 15 surnames) doesn’t believe in Windigos. Nevertheless, the kindly 77-year-old Pikangikum elder says his brother David, a former chief, felt a change blow into the community in the late 1970s. “He said something was coming this way, that it was coming from the west,” Strang says from his kitchen table. “I don’t know how he knew.” Like many in Pikangikum, Matthew keeps his house almost unbearably hot, as if to spite the cold outside. It’s also a way to keep kids inside at night, where they belong. “In our younger days we always had things to do,” Strang says. “We were exhausted by the end of the day.” In 1954, when Matthew was 20, there was exactly one recorded drunken assault in Pikangikum; a study of the reserve published five years later noted its “low incidence of violence.” Right around that time the outpost store began carrying items beyond the staples such as flour and lard, and started advancing credit. Welfare also came in.

As the anthropologist R.W. Dunning described in 1959: “People could gather in the central community at Pikangikum Lake and the ration subsidies were handed out from the trading store on a monthly basis. It was convenient to spend more time at the centre than travel back and forth from the store to trapping grounds.” The legacy of this abrupt change lives on today. The Northern Store is a one-stop shop to cash welfare cheques, buy food and clothing and to eat at Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken, the reserve’s only restaurants. When I visited recently, a head of lettuce cost $8, and chocolate cake was on sale for $2. Red Bull costs about the same as bottled water, and the cans litter the reserve.

The sniffers are everywhere and nowhere. During the day about the only sign of them are the foot trails darting off Pikangikum’s roads, and the knotted, leaking bags of gasoline they leave behind. I saw a group of girls stumble out of the forest and onto Airport Road in the late afternoon, dressed as young girls do: tight pants, tippy heeled boots, makeup. They all cradled white bags full of brown liquid as they walked, and darted off into the forest again when they saw me. The girls must have already been sniffing, says Hank Turtle, a 38-year-old father of seven and a member of Pikangikum’s month-old solvent abuse team. “When you sniff it, it starts looking like a mud puddle. As it evaporates it gets darker.”

You can’t always see the sniffers, but you can often hear them at night, howling at the sky. They are the reason many park their trucks with the fuel cap as close to their houses as possible. Randy Keeper’s truck has been robbed of gas so many times that he’s drilled rivets into the fuel door that he unbolts every time he fills up. “I try to keep my truck low on gas,” says Kenneth Strang. “The sniffers would get it anyways.”

Sniffing isn’t the only way to get high, but it is certainly the cheapest. Pikangikum has been a dry community since a 1986 bylaw. Bootleggers risk having their vehicles impounded for bringing alcohol to the reserve because it is such a profitable business: 26 oz. of Silk Tassel whiskey, a favoured brand that sells for about $24 in Red Lake, fetches $120 in Pikangikum—nearly 70 per cent of the biweekly welfare cheque. During the spring ice breakup, when land- and water-based travel off the reserve is impossible, the price climbs to $200. Some others brew their own hooch. A popular recipe calls for a mixture of Tang, ketchup, raisins, yeast and water to sit in a warm dark place for 28 days. Dragged from the closet, the brew tastes like sweet, over-fermented beer. “It’s supposed to be good for hangovers,” says Strang, chuckling.

During the winter, when temperatures regularly fall below -30, sniffers usually hole up in a house to sniff and drink. One Friday night, Hank and I approached once such spot, a graffiti-strewn clapboard shack along Airport Road, and knocked on the window. A girl who looked to be in her early 20s pulled back the curtain and cracked it open. The smell of gas floated into the night air. She was in there with a bunch of her friends, she said. After a couple of minutes trying to negotiate his way into the house, the girl started screaming at Hank in Ojibwa. “She doesn’t want to talk to you,” he tells me calmly as we back away.

In Ojibwa, sniffers are known as ohmeenuhgeegahg—a person going around to take a sniff. They are arguably the most obvious sign of human distress in Pikangikum, and are treated with a mix of resignation and disdain in the community. Chasing the high, which some liken to pot, is intergenerational, something I saw when visiting the home of Juliet Turtle and Charlie Strang, who lost five of their 12 children to suicide. The couple’s kids are buried in the yard next to the house. On the day I was there, a young girl was sniffing in the outhouse not 30 feet away. When she saw me she dashed into the house. We were meant to speak, but Charlie came to the door in a rage. Neither he nor Juliet, he said, wanted to talk.

The sight of the couple’s granddaughter doesn’t surprise Kenneth Strang. A father of four who wears a Fu Manchu moustache and a “Native Pride” baseball cap, he lost a son and a daughter to suicide. Last year, he struggled to keep one of his sons, Kilmer, from the habit. “I almost lost him to the sniffers,” Kenneth says. In 1997, according to the coroner’s report, there were 147 identified solvent abusers in Pikangikum. Today, “Probably half the youth population of the reserve sniffs,” says Anthony Quill, 26, another solvent abuse counsellor. “I got sniffers who are sent home from school because they smell of gas. They feel rejected. That’s why they sniff.”

“Or because they’re bored,” says Hank.

“Or they have problems at home,” says 29-year-old Sean Peters.

Hank Turtle, Sean Peters and Anthony Quill are on the frontline of Pikangikum’s anti-solvent abuse initiative. In their tiny corner of the band office, there are eight filing cabinet drawers full of open solvent abuse cases. The nightly youth patrol, which Kevin Suggashie helped organize in 2000, was abruptly cancelled last fall, after receiving threats from solvent abusers.

Sniffers are usually sent to one of four treatment houses in Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. In-community treatment is limited to a 12-day group therapy excursion to a cabin across Lake Pikangikum that only recently started up again after a hiatus of several years. But the lure of gas sniffing is strong, a teenage rite of passage akin to getting drunk for the first time, as one expert put it in the coroner’s report. Somewhere between 95 and 100 per cent of the kids who take the in-community program end up sniffing again, according to the report. As for the police, they turn a blind eye, Hanks says. “The OPP doesn’t do s–t about them. When they see a drunk they have to react, but when they see a sniffer they don’t care. Or they’re scared.” (Pikangikum’s band council forbade me from speaking with reserve law enforcement.)

And so the cycle continues every night. Hank and I walk through Squirrel Rock, a neighbourhood jutting out into Lake Pikangikum to the east of the band office. He says sniffers will usually start scouring for gas once the sun goes down. Anything is fair game: garages, people’s cars, snowmobiles, the public works trucks in the yards by the airport. The gas pump at the Northern Store has been broken into more times than anyone can remember. When sniffing started in the ’90s, Hank says, “they’d inhale it through the nose, in a rag. Now they take it in through the mouth. More intense.”

The moon lights up the trails through Squirrel Rock’s forests. There aren’t any sniffers there yet, but Hank points out the houses where it’s going on. “I don’t want to go in,” he tells me, smiling. “They might offer me a drink, and I’d be tempted to take it.” There are a few walking the road, bags in hand. At 9:30, we find a sniffer on the back porch of a house overlooking the lake. He’s swaying, dizzy-looking, confused. When I ask to take his picture he raises his bag of gas in the air, toasting the camera.

Later, Hank takes me to a cliff overlooking the lake where his three brothers are buried. He doesn’t say much about their passing, but his stint in jail and struggles with alcohol are testament enough to his pain. “I got a lot of grief,” he says simply at one point.

A passenger flying north from Sioux Lookout will see a patchwork frenzy of clear-cuts that come to an abrupt end about 50 km south of Pikangikum. This marks Ontario’s far-north boundary, as well as the southern edge of the reserve’s ancestral lands once used solely for trapping, hunting and fishing. As the lack of clear-cuts shows, these 1.3 million hectares of black spruce, white pine, poplar and white birch have been fiercely defended from the forestry operations so apparent to the south—and for many represent Pikangikum’s shining future. In 1996, then-chief Louie Quill began a process that would, 16 years later, culminate in Whitefeather, the Pikangikum-owned corporation on the cusp of harvesting the lumber in its own territory. Today, Whitefeather’s office occupies two offices on the ground floor of the Pikangikum Hotel. Sitting in the designated map room, cramped with humming computers and an industrial printer, Paddy Peters and his uncle Gideon, an elder, explain why the community decided to log its ancestral lands—something unthinkable a generation ago. “When we saw the high unemployment, people on social assistance, the decline of the fur trade, we decided we had to do something,” says Paddy, a former chief. There are potentially 385 permanent jobs associated with the project, a godsend in a community with an unemployment rate around 90 per cent.

Importantly, the new jobs will involve training. Education remains by far the most effective antidote to suicide, yet the very act of going to school is often difficult. In 2007, for reasons unknown, a kid named Nicky burned down Pikangikum’s school. Since then, Pikangikum’s 732 students have gone to school in what look like large mobile homes that sit on cement foundations—a nod, perhaps, to their apparent permanent status. They are plastered with graffiti on the outside, but the classrooms are clean and well-lit. Students file into class, many wearing headphones and fiddling with MP3 players, with a sulking indifference seemingly patented by Grade 9 students worldwide.

At first blush, it could be a classroom anywhere. But one of the first things new teachers learn to deal with is the long, uncomfortable silences following a question to the class. “It took me two months for them to say a word to me,” says Christyne Horvath, after coaxing out an answer to grammar question. It’s often like the students are testing the air with their words, and don’t much like the results.

Everything changes when they get a piece of paper in front of them. Freed from having to speak, the students write frankly about their community. They love Pikangikum’s nature, its hockey arena, fishing and hunting, their families. “It’s peaceful and quiet at nights. No trucks and Ski-Doos driving around,” writes Hosea Turtle. Of the 31 students I asked, 24 said drinking, sniffing and suicide were the biggest problems. “The thing I want to change here is for people to stop drinking and sniffing and for the violence to stop,” writes 14-year-old Jacob Kejick. “The worst thing is seeing sniffers around holding weapons,” writes Paige Suggashie, 14. “They usually use metal things and hockey sticks.” Despite it all, a surprising number of kids want to stay in Pikangikum. “I want to stay here forever because the sunsets are beautiful here,” 14-year-old Paige Suggashie writes. “I don’t want to be here because I want to go home,” writes her classmate Rocky Turtle. “My real home [is] ‘Heaven.’ ”

All told, high school students in Pikangikum have lost a total of 29.5 days of school for what principal Jo-Anne Donnelly calls “hydro, water, deaths” so far this school year. In January, the school closed for three weeks following a mould outbreak in the teachers’ quarters. Aspergillus, an airborne fungus, sent three high school teachers home—and one to the operating table for major sinus surgery. The elementary school, meanwhile, is only open half days, “basically so we can get some food into them,” says Donnelly. Teacher Christyne Horvath, a petite 25-year-old from Corunna, Ont., adding that this “lack of momentum” is at least partly responsible for the dropout rate. Her Learning Strategies class had 40 kids at the beginning of the year; on the day I visited, there were 13.

Even those who graduate won’t likely find work. Chronic unemployment means the band office is one of the few places to get a job in Pikangikum, yet students “know that if they go to high school and college and come back to run for council, if the last name’s not right they aren’t going to get anywhere,” Donnelly tells me. Of the 15 family names in Pikangikum, only seven have held the position of chief since Pikangikum became a separate band in 1908. Some say your last name also plays a role getting a new house. Pikangikum requires roughly 250 new houses to accommodate the current population. The band council is hoping for 20 this year—and Philip Suggashie thinks he knows who is going to get them. Suggashie, his wife Kay and 11 children and grandchildren live in a 12-by 24-foot shack on Lake Pikangikum. The windows are cracked and there are holes in the bare drywall. There’s hardly room to breathe. He says he’s given up asking when he’ll get a new house. In the band office, he says, there’s a bulletin board with hundreds of names on it. “The chief, the deputy and councillors say who should get houses. It’s favouritism. They give them to their friends and relatives,” Philip says. (“I’m not sure how to answer that,” says Deputy Chief Lyle Keeper when I ask him about this. “It seems like everyone is related to someone somehow.”)

Still, former chief Gordon Peters agrees with Philip. “I think favouritism plays a role in the decisions. You see the chief’s house, he’s got two or three brand new houses around his.” Most criticism is aimed at the federal government, however. As far back as 1994, Pikangikum’s suicide rate, its lack of running water and the scourge of gas sniffing has been parliamentary fodder used to embarrass the government in power, yet the situation has largely remained the same—or, in the case of suicides, gotten worse. In April 2007, Jim Prentice, then Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, flew to Pikangikum with a promise of just over $46 million for school upgrades, water and wastewater systems improvements, and funds to connect the community to the electrical grid. Five years on, nothing has happened. Prentice’s 2007 visit, meanwhile, is best remembered locally for something else entirely. When the minister asked to use the facilities, he was directed to one of Pikangikum’s many overflowing outhouses. “He took a piss behind the outhouse, because he didn’t like what he saw inside,” says Deputy Chief Keeper.

Billy Joe Strang doesn’t seem in the least bit concerned with Pikangikum’s seemingly perpetual bricks-and-mortar issues. Focusing on water and electricity, he says, masks the community’s real problem: the abject failure of many parents in the community. “Infrastructure is relatively simple to fix, but parenting isn’t,” Strang says. “You’re going to have the same problems whether or not you have running water.” The burly, soft-spoken fellow had an epiphany six years ago, when he saw two kids, “maybe eight or nine years old,” wander by his house at four in the morning. “I can’t get that image out of my head. Kids like that are going to grow up not knowing right from wrong.”

Billy Joe, chairman of the Pikangikum Health Authority, says the reserve’s societal ills—problems with police, alcohol abuse, sniffing, violence, teen pregnancy—stem from the lack of proper parenting. “Maybe because we thought we were smarter than our parents,” says the 42-year-old father of seven. “I have a pretty good idea that people are going to have a problem with that comment.” It’s crucial to his way of thinking, however. His office is in the process of purchasing a piece of land 35 km outside of the community. The plan is to set up a camp where not just sniffers but the families of sniffers would be sent a week at a time, three times a year, for family therapy, well away from Pikangikum’s demons.

Billy Joe hopes this will keep more coffins from going into the ground; like everyone else in this corner of the world, he knows there are far too many there already.

Last week, the NDP criticized Conservative Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu after Mr. Boisvenu suggested convicted murders be given rope and allowed to decide for themselves whether they wanted to live. Pat Martin referred to the Senator using a bad word.

On Monday, Conservative MP Greg Rickford rose before Question Period and reported those events to the House as follows.

The NDP wants to silence victims, urging a well-known victims’ advocate to stop speaking out about Canada’s justice system.

Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu has some ideas on reducing prison expenses.

“Basically, every killer should (have) the right to his own rope in his cell. They can decide whether to live,” Sen. Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu told reporters Wednesday.

A victims’ rights advocate and now a senator, Boisvenu also says the death penalty should be considered in certain cases when there’s no hope of rehabilitation. He says limited use of capital punishment could save money. He cited the case of the Shafias — the Montrealers who were convicted this week of killing four female family members. Boisvenu estimates that it will cost Canadian taxpayers $10 million to keep them locked up.

In the case of the Shafias, Mr. Boisvenu apparently said “returning them to their country might be a tougher sentence than to keep them here, where our prisons are a lot more comfortable.”

Nycole Turmel: Mr. Speaker, that is not good enough. What Senator Boisvenu did is against the law: we cannot call on people to kill themselves. This is clear. The death penalty debate has been closed in Canada for decades. Why are the Conservatives reopening the old debates?

Stephen Harper: Mr. Speaker, as I just said, the senator has clearly withdrawn those words. I think we all understand that Senator Boisvenu and his family have suffered horribly in the past and obviously we understand his emotions in that regard, but this government is focused on making sure we protect victims in the future.

Stephen Harper: Monsieur le Président, j’ai été très clair. Ce gouvernement ne va pas couper les prestations de nos aînés. Je suis très clair: en même temps, nous allons protéger le système pour les générations à venir. C’est pour l’opposition de faire peur aux aînés, c’est pour nous de protéger les aînés. If I could also just reply once again to the previous comment on the senator. I would encourage the NDP to really focus on trying to help us deal with the criminal justice system, trying to prevent the kinds of victims of terrible crime we have seen in the past and to do things so there are not more people like the Boisvenu family in the future.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/give-them-a-rope/feed/61‘Not to be forgotten’http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/not-to-be-forgotten/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/not-to-be-forgotten/#commentsFri, 18 Nov 2011 16:34:20 +0000Aaron Wherryhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=225960An ad hoc committee of Conservative, New Democrat and Liberal MPs has released an extensive report on how government can better deal with palliative care, home care, long-term care, pain…

An ad hoc committee of Conservative, New Democrat and Liberal MPs has released an extensive report on how government can better deal with palliative care, home care, long-term care, pain control, suicide prevention and elder abuse.

The palliative care philosophy is person-centered, family-focused and community-based. It moves us from disease or condition-specific care to person-centered care. It recognizes that the psycho-social and spiritual dimensions have profound impact upon health and well being, and that a variety of specific conditions may be operating on different levels in the chronically ill or dying person’s life. The philosophy of palliative care permeating medical culture is more important than the simple delivery of “services.” As family physicians and local nurses come to accept a palliative care philosophy, palliative care services can begin to develop organically in communities.

The committee makes 14 recommendations, ranging from calls for national strategies to specific tax and funding measures.

From the 21st Maclean’s University Rankings—on newsstands now. Story by Shanda Deziel.

Jonathan P. describes his second year at the University of British Columbia as “very, very rough.” He had five intensive reading and writing courses in international relations, plus volunteering commitments. But as an overachiever, he felt “on top of his game.” When he fell behind at week five, the Quebec City native decided he needed to work harder. “The obvious solution, to me,” says Jonathan, 21 at the time, “was to spend less time with friends, less time doing fun stuff, and study, study, study.” By week 10, as assignments piled up, he was sleeping three hours a night. “I woke up one morning,” he says, “and I just didn’t have any taste for my studies and every day looked like it would pretty much never end.” He would call home crying. When he told his stepmom he wasn’t eating, she urged him to go to a doctor, who prescribed sleeping pills that got him through the semester. “When I was home for Christmas,” he says, “just the thought of going back to UBC, I was like, ‘Hell, no. This is not happening.’ ”

Jonathan, who does not want to use his last name, now blogs about mental health and awareness on a university website called Healthy Minds (blogs.ubc.ca/healthyminds), which was set up to reduce the stigma of mental illness, help students succeed in their studies, and signal “a culture shift at UBC that favours personal wellness.”

Mental health professionals on campuses agree anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses are on the rise. A 2010 survey of 30,000 students in the U.S. and Canada showed 84 per cent of respondents from universities and colleges (including UBC and Simon Fraser) felt “overwhelmed,” six per cent had considered suicide and one per cent had made an attempt. Robert Francks, clinical director of McGill Mental Health Services, says universities are “perfect incubators” for mental illness “as students are away from families, and may face financial worries, drug abuse and relationship problems.” Then there is the “enormous expectations about grades.” These are triggers for depression, bipolar disease, eating disorders, schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, all of which normally surface between the ages of 15 to 24.

For Jack Windeler, an 18-year-old first-year Queen’s University student from Toronto, the difficult transition to university ended in suicide in 2010, one of three confirmed suicides at the school in the last two school years.

Jack’s studies began slipping in October 2009. “He told us he was a little bit behind but was catching up,” says his father, Eric Windeler. “We were having very healthy, normal conversations about how it was going and we were getting standard answers back.”

There were signs, but the cues were missed. When he stopped handing in assignments, the teaching assistant thought he was dropping the class. Now residence dons and other Queen’s staff take mental health first aid, which involves two days of training.

Windeler started the Jack Project at Kids Help Phone, which runs a website that helps teenagers recognize mental health problems and encourages them to intervene.

Jonathan stayed home after Christmas, went into therapy, and developed what he calls a “radical self-care plan.” When he returned to UBC the next September, he followed these rules: “I would not do work past 10 p.m.,” says the student, now in fourth year. “I would go to yoga four times a week. I’d play ultimate Frisbee with my friends. And I’d take one day a week off school work entirely.” He assumed his grades would drop, but was surprised to discover that wasn’t true. “I don’t mean to brag,” he says, “but my average went up a full 10 per cent.”

SIGNS OF CONCERN

One in four people between the ages of 15 and 24 will suffer a mental health problem. Here are some signs, according to the Jack Project video (thejackproject.org):

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/education/uniandcollege/big-brains-big-danger/feed/0Human stepshttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/human-steps/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/human-steps/#commentsTue, 01 Nov 2011 15:59:23 +0000Aaron Wherryhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=222876Bob Rae talks about his experience with mental illness.
The recent debate in the House of Commons on the need for a national suicide strategy was an eye-opening experience for …

The recent debate in the House of Commons on the need for a national suicide strategy was an eye-opening experience for all of us. Members came forward and shared their own experiences, there was no name calling, partisan chippiness or the usual antics that go with a House debate. There was a sense that we are all in this together.

So that was progress. The next step is to match the words with even more deeds. There is a desperate shortage of help out there, and families with children all too often feel they are on their own. It will take a greater commitment of dollars and resources to make things happen, and that’s harder to do in tough times. But it can and must be done. The problems won’t go away on their own. My grandmother Nell had a wonderful expression whenever she encountered a mountain of a problem. “Take the human footsteps”. That’s what we can and must do.

Tuesday night the House overwhelmingly passed the Liberal motion calling for a national suicide prevention strategy. Debate on the motion stars here and resumes here. Liberal MP John McKay’s speech in support of the motion is below.

In 1581, the Japanese lord Kikkawa Tsuneie, who had agreed to surrender his besieged castle if he was allowed to commit suicide, “heroically disembowelled himself,” according to a contemporary text. On his death day, he carefully chose his robes (“a pea-green kimono and coat of black silk with matching pea-green lining”), graciously allowed three retainers to kill themselves too, recited two poems, sliced himself once across the belly and again in a north-south direction, spoke to the swordsman ready to deliver the coup de grâce (“Generals will be inspecting this head. Make sure you cut it off well”), and died. “Such was the glorious end of lord Kikkawa, who was 34,” sums up the chronicle.

Honour cultures have always put a premium on a good death, meaning a bloody and defiant one, but few have taken it to Japanese extremes. Medieval Japan, racked by endemic warfare, had no tradition of prisoner-taking; to fall into enemy hands was, usually, to be put to death in a shameful fashion. (The very act of being captured, which inferred cowardice, was shameful in itself.) Samurai fighters also cultivated an aesthetic sense foreign to Western feudal warriors—King John of England entertained his dinner guests with hangings, not poetry recitals.

Seppuku combined everything samurai cared for. Exceedingly painful, it demonstrated courage and offered an opportunity to recite poetry or, even better, to write a poem in one’s own blood: it allowed a samurai to see himself as the master of his own fate. By the end of the Middle Ages, it was the only right way to die. After the Tokugawa shogunate enforced peace on Japan in 1603, it used seppuku as an upper-class death penalty—enemies would be ordered to do it—but smoothed its edges. The condemned had barely to touch the dagger (or a substitute paper fan) before the headsman struck. When Japan modernized in the 19th century, resisters brought back the real thing in a last-ditch defence of Old Japan, seeing seppuku as the very essence of national honour.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/review-seppuku-a-history-of-samurai-suicide/feed/0‘It is now a political question’http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/it-is-now-a-political-question/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/it-is-now-a-political-question/#commentsTue, 04 Oct 2011 20:01:44 +0000Aaron Wherryhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=218593The Liberals used their opposition day to move a motion calling on the government to formulate and fund a national strategy on suicide prevention and they used all nine of…

The Liberals used their opposition day to move a motion calling on the government to formulate and fund a national strategy on suicide prevention and they used all nine of their opportunities in Question Period to press the government on various facets of the problem. In an op-ed this morning, interim leader Bob Rae laid out the reasons for concern.

Today, 10 Canadians will take their own lives, a per capita rate three times that of the United States’, largely due to the staggering number of suicides among aboriginal Canadians. In fact, suicide is the leading cause of death in men ages 25 to 29 and 40 to 44, women ages 30 to 34, and the second cause of death among adolescents.

It is no surprise, then, that all of us have been touched by suicide, have lost friends and loved ones, and have tried to figure out why lives that seemed together and well-focused are suddenly ended. But the bewilderment of silence and pain that surrounds mental health has to end. It is no longer just a personal question; it is now a political question.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/it-is-now-a-political-question/feed/36Why it’s time to retire the enforcerhttp://www.macleans.ca/general/why-its-time-to-retire-the-enforcer/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/why-its-time-to-retire-the-enforcer/#commentsMon, 12 Sep 2011 14:15:39 +0000Emma Teitelhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=213664The NHL enforcer’s career is nasty, brutish, and often short

Imagine a job has become available at the office of your dreams. The description is straightforward: all you have to do is pick a fight every day with someone you’re not angry at and you don’t necessarily dislike. You make a fraction of what your co-workers make and every fourth day or so you incur an injury that could culminate in a degenerative brain disease conducive to depression—or worse. But there’s a perk: you get to work in the office.

Meet the NHL enforcer—an unpopular position of late, and the subject of innumerable Canadian media debates following the “apparent suicides” or “accidental deaths” of hockey tough guys Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien and, most recently, 35-year-old Wade Belak. New York Ranger Derek Boogaard was just shy of his 29th birthday when a lethal mix of alcohol and oxycodone took his life in May. Winnipeg Jet Rick Rypien, 27, was found dead in his Alberta home in August, after more than 10 years of battling depression. Wade Belak, retired enforcer and father of two, apparently committed suicide in a Toronto hotel/condominium on Aug. 31.

The majority of people in sports, from broadcasters to bloggers and NHL players themselves, are loath to concede a connection linking the deaths. Any three people in any profession, they argue, could have ended their lives within a few months of one another for reasons unrelated to their line of work. As usual, they contend, the media’s impulse to equate hockey violence with depression is sensational journalism at its worst.

Arguments like these don’t just carry a whiff of self-service; they’re obtuse to the point of dishonesty. Because though we may never know exactly why these enforcers hit rock bottom, one fact remains indisputable: the only people who can offer any credible explanation for their deaths are—or once were—enforcers themselves. It doesn’t matter that there’s dissent among the ranks (Toronto enforcer Tie Domi, for example, chalks the timing of the deaths up to pure chance). There’s enough “tough guy” testimony to prove that if hockey violence doesn’t necessarily make players kill themselves, it at least makes them think about it.

“This is me,” former “goon” Jim Thomson told CTV in the wake of Belak’s death. “I’m not saying anything about Wade or the other guys who have died but I’ve thought about many times of taking my life.” Echoing Thomson is retired Montreal Canadiens heavyweight Georges Laraque. “I used to feel that way in my first couple years,” he said in a 2009 blog posting. “I used to not be able to sleep before games and I would sweat in the afternoon. Sometimes I was even praying that the other guy—or even me—would be scratched so the fight wouldn’t happen.”

Herein lies the heart of the dishonesty. We can defend hockey violence all we want, but as long as we insist it’s spontaneous desire that makes an enforcer fight, and not his duty, we’re all accomplices in sacrificing these young men in the name of the game we supposedly love. The role of enforcer is comparable to sentry man or prison guard. Antagonism, aggression and yes, fear, aren’t by-products of the job, but the job itself. Yet it seems to be beyond the moral imagination of the NHL to realize that when a job requires you to be consistently brutish, even when you’re not, depression—even suicide—may not be far off.

The late Bob Probert and Reggie Fleming were both veteran enforcers whose brain autopsies showed chronic traumatic encephalopathy—a progressive degenerative brain disease associated with erratic behaviour and depression. And Probert and Fleming played in a different time—before staged fights between designated tough guys were celebrated and glorified. Chances are the numbers of damaged brains have increased since then. Jim Peplinski, once a renowned fighter with the Calgary Flames, considers today’s premeditated fighting a possible cause of the emotional hazards described by Laraque and Thomson. “I never held any intentional premeditation,” he told the Globe and Mail recently, “that there was going to be a fight. Sometimes, it happened. What I see today is different than that.” What he sees is something more sinister: men who will themselves to fight. Even professionals who are wary of tying hockey fights to suicide hear the tolling of something ominous: “Facing violence on a nightly basis,” says sports psychologist Saul Miller, “may stress the soul.” It may also destroy it.

The shock and pain of the families involved notwithstanding, the prevailing “surprise” of the hockey world that the happy-go-lucky attitude of Belak contradicts his death is simply misinformed. It is well known among psychologists that when depressed people suddenly feel better, it may be a warning sign they’re actually strong enough to act on suicidal thoughts. Unfortunately, no one in hockey picked up on Belak’s plucky spirit for what it might have been: a bad omen. But there’s intuition and then there’s the NHL. The league has promised to conduct a “review” of the tragedies, but no amount of suicide awareness will help while the role of enforcer remains strong within the league. If the NHL cares more about its players’ welfare than saving face and filling seats, it will say goodbye to the goon forever. I’ve played hockey all my life, and I’ve been nervous going into plenty of games. But my nervousness was leavened with a certainty: I knew I was going to play a game—I wasn’t going to war.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/why-its-time-to-retire-the-enforcer/feed/3Wade Belak’s final hourshttp://www.macleans.ca/society/wade-belaks-final-hours/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/wade-belaks-final-hours/#commentsFri, 09 Sep 2011 14:00:31 +0000Charlie Gillishttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=213765The night before he was found dead of a suspected suicide, the former NHL enforcer was out on the town and in good spirits

In broadcasting, as in hockey, reliability ranks high on the list of professional virtues. Dead air or squandered studio time are radio sins on par with an empty dressing-room stall before practice. The responsible party can expect retribution and, if he keeps it up, a ticket to the bush leagues.

Some athletes-cum-commentators take a while to grasp that, so the text Wade Belak sent Jeremy Bennefield last Tuesday night came as reassurance to the Nashville radio producer, who had been tasked with grooming the former NHL tough guy to host a weekly show on an all-sports FM station. “I’ll be there on Friday night,” wrote Belak, who was in Toronto at the time. “Staying until Sunday. Any way we can tape a show in that time slot?” The time signature on the message read 11:29 p.m. ET. Bennefield didn’t pick it up until 9:15 a.m. the following day, and he made sure to fire off a quick reply: “Yes, we’ll make it work.”

Three hours later, Belak was found hanging in his hotel room in downtown Toronto, the victim of an apparent suicide (though authorities have not confirmed the cause of death). And Bennefield has been pondering that text exchange ever since.“Somebody actually asked me whether I thought this was a reach-out,” he says from Nashville. “You know: whether Wade was seeking some sort of reassurance that he had something to live for.” But that doesn’t square with the man he had seen at a taping just days earlier, ribbing staff at 102.5 The Game, cracking jokes at his own expense. While recording the inaugural episode of his weekly show and podcast “The Game Changer,” the 35-year-old had enthused about setting down roots in Nashville, where he’d just wound down his playing career. “Based on my conversations with him, based on the texts that I got hours before the fact,” he says, “my impression is this wasn’t a guy looking for a way out.”

The living Belak will be remembered many ways: athlete, prankster, protector, family man and philanthropist. In death, he remains a cipher, as friends and former teammates struggle to square the favoured narrative of a hockey fighter in distress with the carefree man they knew. Yes, Belak suffered the miseries of his trade, they say—the injuries and painkillers and healthy scratches from games he’d hoped to play. And yes, he fought bouts of depression. His mother Lorraine confirmed as much prior to Belak’s private funeral in Nashville. Yet by all accounts his troubles ran nowhere near as deep as those of Derek Boogaard and Rick Rypien, tough guys to whom Belak has inevitably been compared because they too were found dead in what proved to be a dreadful NHL off-season.

Of course, informed skepticism is no match for moral outrage. The cluster of tragedies has given rise to long-overdue debate on the toll fighting takes on its practitioners, and whether fisticuffs must at long last be expunged from the sport. “I would prefer today, with the way the game has gone, to see fighting completely eliminated,” former Calgary Flames forward Jim Peplinski told the Globe and Mail in a typical comment. “I think most fights—90 per cent—add nothing to the game.” Part and parcel of that discussion is the grim roll of pugilists debilitated or destroyed by addiction and mental health problems: John Kordic, Dave Semenko, Link Gaetz, Gino Odjick, Louie DeBrusk, Kurt Walker, Darren McCarty, Brian McGrattan, to name a few from the game’s modern era.

Belak is a problematic fit on that list. He’d been paid handsomely for his services by managing to stay in the big league for 10 seasons, and if you believe those who knew him, he’d welcomed his exit cue. Dean Blundell, a radio morning man who got to know Belak well during his time in Toronto, recalls texting him last February after he’d been relegated to the minors by the Nashville Predators, the transaction that effectively ended Belak’s hockey career. For many players, it would have been a delicate moment, but not Belak. “He said, ‘Oh bud, I’m so happy to be done,’ ” says Blundell. “He had so many things he was looking forward to doing.”

Indeed, he’d cultivated an array of media contacts who were easing his transition into broadcasting, several of whom he conversed with in the days leading up to his death. He’d also signed up for Battle of the Blades, the hit CBC program where hockey players are paired with professional figure skaters for an ice-dancing competition. He was making up for lost time with his wife, Jennifer, and his young daughters, Alex and Andie.

Blundell doesn’t pretend to know what led Belak to the point he reached last week. But one thing, he says, is certain. “It’s unfair to lump Wade into some category of [tough] guys struggling with certain issues.” Over years of often highly personal conversations between the two, the host recalls, Belak never once complained about his job in hockey. “Put it this way, of all the people I’ve ever met, Wade wasn’t in anybody’s category,” concludes Blundell. “He was in his own category.”

If he’d been born a few years earlier, Belak might have avoided the enforcer label that he carried to his grave. As a junior, the straw-haired kid from North Battleford, Sask., personified the player NHL managers prized at the moment—big, obliging and handy with his fists. In 1994, the year the Quebec Nordiques drafted him 12th overall, Belak stood six foot four and weighed 215 lb., and while the scouts didn’t exactly rave about his skills, they loved the 226 penalty minutes he’d put up as a junior in Saskatoon. “When he blows,” read one report, “look out.”

Unfortunately for Belak, the game was starting to change. Coaches turned to strategic systems emphasizing judgment and mobility that Belak lacked, and learning on the job was not an option. Between 1997 and ’99, he saw action in just 30 NHL games, prompting Colorado to trade him to Calgary in 1999. The following season, he fought off the effects of a shoulder injury to record 122 penalty minutes in 40 games with the Flames, yet he remained very much on the bubble.

Only after the Toronto Maple Leafs claimed him off waivers in February 2001 did Belak make an impression of sorts in the league. By then, Belak had learned to do whatever it took to get into the lineup, moving from defence to forward if asked, beating on opponents when called upon. He’d also learned the power of his personality. Reporters gravitated to the tattooed quote machine despite his limited playing time, knowing he’d likely crack wise about himself or needle his teammates. One year at training camp, he and a TV reporter mocked up a story in which Belak purported, straight-faced, to be “ready to play on the first line” with star centre Mats Sundin. When asked for his reaction, Sundin broke up laughing.

It was vintage Belak, and reflected his willingness to let down his guard in ways his teammates never could. Tellingly, some of the most moving remembrances of him over the past week have come not from current players, but from the extended family of radio and TV personalities Belak had befriended and in some cases invited to his home. Blundell was one. So was Michael Landsberg, a TSN talk show host who described Belak as “far and away the closest friend” he had among athletes he’d interviewed.

Did all the bonhomie mask some deep torment that led Belak to take his life? Maybe. But his confidants resist the sort of tears-of-a-clown story that others seem eager to assign him. Nick Kypreos, a former enforcer with the Leafs, lived a few houses away during the seven years Belak played in Toronto. Far from suppressing his problems, says Kypreos, who now works as a hockey analyst on Rogers Sportsnet, Belak opened up to friends about his struggles with depression. The only thing that went unspoken between them related to fighting’s emotional toll. “You don’t really discuss your inner feelings about the job description with another guy who fights,” says Kypreos. “You just know.”

None of this is to say Belak was an open book. Paul Dennis, a psychologist who worked with the Leafs during Belak’s tenure there, was quoted widely last week noting that enforcers feel compelled to maintain an aura of invincibility, and therefore keep their darkest fears to themselves. There’s also no denying Belak was compelled to contemplate life after hockey earlier and more often than most 10-year NHLers. When the Leafs dealt him to Florida for a fifth-round draft pick in 2008, the writing was on the wall. He’d battled knee, shoulder and abdominal injuries to stay in the game. At one point in Toronto, he’d gone 143 games without a goal (he joked that he was trying to set a record). Florida dealt him shortly after the start of the following season to Nashville, where he played 92 goalless games over parts of three seasons before the Predators offered him a choice. He could report to their minor-pro affiliate in Milwaukee. Or he could join the Predators’ television broadcast team.

“He was really, really good,” sighs Bennefield. “He had perspective. He broke the game down. He explained it in a way that somebody who wasn’t a hockey fan still knew what was going on. But he didn’t dumb it down to the point that someone who does know hockey felt like they were being grammar-schooled.”

Bennefield isn’t the only producer lamenting Belak’s passing. Within a few months of his retirement, a menu of media opportunities lay before him, including a job as an ice-level reporter on TV and a regular gig as a hockey analyst on Sportsnet. “The Game Changer,” meanwhile, offered the chance to branch out into general sports talk. “We encouraged him to talk about more than just hockey—other sports, even stuff in the news,” says Troy Hanson, the station’s program director. For his first broadcast, Belak arrived with notes on U.S. college football.

Belak was a man on the fly when he arrived in Toronto on July 18 to prepare for Battle of the Blades, recalls Kim Navarro, the U.S. ice-dancing star whom producers paired with Belak for the competition. The two met for the first time in their hotel lobby on the eve of the show’s obligatory “boot camp,” a crash course designed to bring the hockey players up to speed on figure skating. “We ended up talking for a couple of hours,” Navarro recalls. “He told me all about Nashville and his work down there, all about his family. I knew then it was going to be a really fun experience.”

Juggling his obligations while preparing for his job as a live hockey broadcaster wasn’t easy. Still, friends say he appeared equal to the challenge, working hard to maintain personal relationships as he hopscotched between cities. Four days before his death, he returned to Toronto and sent Blundell a text that read, “Are you alive?”—referring to the weeks that had passed since they’d chatted. They traded a few one-liners and agreed to get together the following week.

Meantime, over the weekend, Belak began training with Navarro and choreographer Renée Roca at an ice complex in neighbouring Mississauga. He told Navarro that his daughter Andie, 7, suffered from Tourette’s syndrome. So the pair chose a Tourette’s clinic at Toronto Western Hospital as the recipient of their winnings on the show. They also chose music for their routines—Belak favoured Genesis and Usher, and danced mawkishly for Roca and Navarro in his attempts to win them over.

As for their on-ice session, “our biggest challenge was skating well while laughing,” Navarro recalls. After one manoeuvre, Belak stood back and critiqued her style: “Some of the other girls can do that better than you,” he deadpanned. And on Monday, he had Roca and Navarro in stitches over dinner at Earl’s. The last time she saw him was Tuesday night, after a few of the contestants had gathered for dinner at a Yorkville sushi restaurant. “We were scheduled to skate the next day at 4 p.m,” she recalls, voice catching. “So we just confirmed that and went our way.”

The text to Bennefield would follow, but from that point, Belak’s movements become murky. He was spotted with fellow Battle contestant Todd Simpson at a hip bar on King Street West called the Underground Garage. But he left the place in good spirits, according to a witness who met him outside at 2 a.m. and who later spoke to the Toronto Star. The next day, he failed to show up for a radio interview, and hotel staff went to check on him. They found his body at 1:40 p.m., and as the news broke, the tributes from his former teammates, coaches and opponents began pouring in. “Great personality in the game of hockey,” wrote Paul Bissonnette of the Phoenix Coyotes on his Twitter feed. “He was such a bright light,” said former Leafs coach Pat Quinn.

The most poignant nod, however, came the day of his funeral, when Nashville forward David Legwand bought a full-page ad in the Tennessean newspaper paying tribute to Belak’s character. It included photos of Belak in an AC/DC T-shirt working the phones at a telethon, and wearing a toy fireman’s hat while reading to elementary school students. The images stood in contrast to those of the players gathered at his funeral—to a man, they wore stricken looks and $2,000 suits. But it was an inspired choice, nonetheless, reminding us that, as surely as he was one of them, Belak was very much one of us.

Authors of a report from the Annenberg Public Policy Center have shown a correlation between the dramatic rise in the portrayal of graphic suicides on film and the increase in the youth suicide rate.

Their study looked at 855 films produced between 1950 to 2006 and found that the number of explicit representations of suicide had tripled over the period. That increase paralleled the tripling of suicide by young people aged 15 to 24 in the U.S. from 1960 to 1990.

“While we cannot establish a causal connection here, it is interesting to note that the tripling of U.S. teen suicide since 1960 coincided with this increase in movie suicide portrayal,” Patrick E. Jamieson, the lead author, said in a press release.

The report also found that portrayals of suicide have become significantly more violent onscreen. The authors blamed the introduction of the PG-13 rating in 1984 for encouraging more graphic scenes. ”There is something seriously wrong with a movie ratings system that attaches a PG-13 rating to a movie containing explicit, graphic modeling of suicide,” Jamieson wrote.

To measure the rate of suicide portrayals, the researchers watched all 855 films and classified suicidal behaviour as a situation in which the character had the “option of living but attempted or completed the taking of his/her life.”

No other nation in recent history appears to have taken so fervently to apocalyptic prophesies as France has, reports the London Times. Then again, not many nations have a government agency specifically responsible for investigating “cults and suspicious spiritual activities.” Indeed, the French agency—known as MIVILUDES—delivered a mass-suicide warning last week, apparently worried about a possible suicide frenzy come Dec. 21, 2012, the day the 5,000-year-old Mayan calendar ends. MIVILUDES contends that the Internet age, natural disasters, and economic turmoil—combined with the ancient Mayan prophecy—have inspired widespread belief in a coming Armageddon (there has been a recent migration of people to the hilltop village of Bugarach, said to be a place immune to apocalypse).

The agency’s concern is not entirely outlandish: in the 1990s, 74 people belonging to a cult called the Order of the Solar Temple—16 of them in France and eight in Quebec—died in murder-suicides to avoid an Armageddon. But cult expert Susan Palmer of Concordia University says that “MIVILUDES is creating artificial emergencies to support the state-sponsored anti-cult movement.” Palmer, whose upcoming book The New Heretics of France, about the French anti-cult movement, believes MIVILUDES spends more time vilifying cults than actually researching them—“obviously trying to justify its own existence.”

Good news

Winnipeggers celebrate news that their NHL team will carry the Jets name.

A royal welcome

When William and Kate arrive in Canada this week, those planning to greet the royal couple will find them pleasantly open to interacting with the common folk. Stuffy etiquette rules have relaxed so much of late that even the official royal website says curtsies and bows are optional. Now it’s all about simple courtesy: handshakes and chit-chat are fine. In fact, even cellphone photos are appropriate. The couple, meanwhile, are reportedly looking forward to attending the Calgary Stampede undeterred by animal rights activists who’ve been trying to deter them from attending.

Out with the evil

The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Moammar Gadhafi, stating there is reason to believe he is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of civilians during protests this year. Libya’s future now clearly lies with the rebels, who this week received a visit from Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. Canada has played a leading role in NATO raids in Libya, and Baird’s trip shows Canada remains committed to seeing a stable democracy replace Gadhafi’s regime.

Fly right

After decades where it seemed aircraft manufacturers were determined to make flying less and less pleasant, Boeing has finally come up with some passenger-friendly innovations. Its newest 737 jet boasts higher cabin storage bins to minimize head bumps, and a flight-attendant call button that can’t be confused with the light switch. Rival EADS, meanwhile, is working on a hypersonic jet that can make the trip from Los Angeles to Tokyo in 2.5 hours, with no greenhouse gas emissions. By mid-century, we may be able to skip continents faster than we can get through airport security.

Less swearing, more swaying

For the third straight week, the comical but controversial children’s book Go the F— to Sleep topped the New York Times bestseller list. But parents desperate for a few hours of shut-eye may want to try a different approach to napping their kids: put them in a hammock. A study out of the University of Geneva says people who curl up on a gently rocking hammock nod off quicker—and sleep more deeply—than they would on a standard mattress.

Bad news

Violent protests erupt in Athens over new austerity measures.

American injustice

Conrad Black’s re-sentencing to 13 more months in prison was heavy-handed, but hardly surprising given his cruel tour through the U.S. justice system. Of the 13 charges he once faced, Black was acquitted of nine (including the most serious ones) in 2007 and further vindicated by a victory at the U.S. Supreme Court, which limited a law used to convict him. In total, Black has served 29 months in prison, paid millions in legal fees and witnessed the destruction of his business empire—all over two charges for which he’s already paid his dues. This latest punishment is simply vindictive.

A different kind of casualty

As Canada’s combat mission in Afghanistan enters its final days, the military is bracing for a much different fight: confronting suicide. A soldier serving in Kandahar was found dead this week, the victim of an apparently self-inflicted wound. If confirmed, his death would be the second suicide in a month, and the fifth since the Afghan mission began. The news follows a report that found female Canadian Forces members in their early 40s are more than twice as likely to kill themselves as their civilian counterparts. Suicide in the ranks is not random, and deserves DND’s attention.

Nuclear summer

Four months after Japan’s earthquake damaged reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, workers are still struggling to get its cooling system back on line. Meanwhile, in the U.S., raging wildfires have forced authorities to shut down the Los Alamos nuclear lab in New Mexico, where scientists developed the first atomic bomb. And in Nebraska, the surging Missouri River threatens to flood two nuke plants, as officials work around the clock to avert a deeper crisis. Is somebody trying to send us a message?

Are you sure that’s clean?

A deadly fungus could be festering inside your dishwasher. A three-year study of black gunk embedded in the rubber seals of 189 household dishwashers, including seven in Canada, found overwhelming evidence of killer pathogens. In explaining the chilling new discovery, the study’s lead researcher, Nina Gunde-Cimerman, said she now washes her dishes by hand.

Studies have shown that places like Denmark and Sweden, which consistently get high scores when it comes to measures of happiness and life satisfaction, also have relatively high suicide rates, the New York Times reports. New research tracking suicide rates suggests that being around happy people could actually make unhappy people feel more depressed. Economists from the UK and the US looked at data on 2.3 million Americans to study life satisfaction scores state by state, and compared them with suicide rates. They found a relationship between overall happiness and suicide risk: states with highest levels of life satisfaction had higher suicide rates, according to the report. Utah, for example, is ranked first in life satisfaction and has the ninth highest suicide rate. New York is 45th in life satisfaction and has the lowest suicide rate. Hawaii was second for life satisfaction and had the fifth highest suicide rate, and New Jersey was 47th for both happiness and suicide.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/happy-places-have-highest-suicide-rates-study/feed/0Suicide rate in work force tied to economy, study showshttp://www.macleans.ca/general/suicide-rate-in-work-force-tied-to-economy-study-shows/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/suicide-rate-in-work-force-tied-to-economy-study-shows/#commentsFri, 15 Apr 2011 15:42:36 +0000macleans.cahttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=184782Rate has followed the economy since the Great Depression

According to a new U.S. government analysis, the suicide rate increased 3 per cent during the 2001 recession and has followed the economy since the Great Depression, going up in bad times and down in good ones. Researchers have argued that economic difficulties can boost the likelihood of suicide among the vulnerable, like those with mental illness, but research results haven’t yet found link, and some studies actually suggest the suicide rate goes down in periods of high unemployment. Using more comprehensive data, this new study found a clear correlation between suicide rates and the business cycle among young and middle-age adults. The study looks at suicide rates per 100,000 Americans for every year from 1928 to 2007, and appears in the American Journal of Public Health.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/suicide-rate-in-work-force-tied-to-economy-study-shows/feed/5Suicide cannot be ignoredhttp://www.macleans.ca/education/university/suicide-cannot-be-ignored/
http://www.macleans.ca/education/university/suicide-cannot-be-ignored/#commentsFri, 19 Nov 2010 06:02:56 +0000Danielle Webbhttp://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/?p=19092Keeping quiet makes it harder for those who suffer to ask for help

In the face of the worst kind of tragedy, the Richardsons did something extraordinary. Ottawa Senators assistant coach Luke Richardson and his wife have been openly discussing their 14-year-old daughter’s weekend suicide, doing their part to break down the stigma around a harsh reality that affects a great deal of young people.

“The Richardson’s family decision, at perhaps their darkest hour, was such a courageous decision. … Without question, they’ve inspired our community to have a dialogue about this issue that people didn’t want to talk about,” Tim Kluke, president and CEO of the Royal Ottawa Foundation for Mental Health, told the Globe and Mail on Wednesday.

Suicide is a leading cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds, second only to transport accidents. According to recent data from Statistics Canada, 475 young people killed themselves in 2007. That means that every single day, at least one person’s son or daughter, brother, sister or friend takes their own life.

And still, barely any of us will breathe a word about it, making it even harder for those contemplating the end of their life to share their pain and ask for help.

A police officer once told me that, as a general rule, “the media doesn’t cover suicide.” This is a statement I come back to every time I hear a young person has taken their own life. And I think about the many others whose names won’t appear in the paper because people are too afraid the mere mention of the word suicide will set someone else off, as if someone who is in the depths of despair hasn’t considered this option before reading about it in a newspaper.

I later recounted this conversation with the police officer to a journalism ethics professor. I wondered if there was some unwritten rule that said journalists shouldn’t mention such things. But he said that, as journalists, we have an obligation to report the truth, and that by not keeping record of how and why young people are dying, we are hiding a part of society that is very much in need of exposure.

The willful ignorance of mental health issues in this country is heartbreaking. I can’t help but think that the tragedy of nearly 500 young suicides every year is amplified by the fact that, in their last moments, these young adults lived in a world where they felt abandoned, a world that wouldn’t let them discuss their pain.

In the wake of their daughter’s tragedy, the Richardson’s gave those closest to her, as well as young people across the country, the opportunity to talk about their pain. And it’s a conversation very much worth having.

When Patrick House gets to know someone, he often finds himself silently assessing them for Toxoplasma gondii, a single-celled parasite doctors and scientists are linking to increased aggression and recklessness, among other things. “I find myself typing people as, ‘Oh, they probably have it,’ or, ‘They probably don’t,’ ” the Stanford University neuroscientist says. “I imagine whether or not people have it in their brains, based on personality profiles.”

About one-third of the world’s human population carries a Toxoplasma infection, the origin of which is overwhelmingly associated with an unlikely sinister source: the common house cat.

Though it can only reproduce sexually in a cat’s gut, Toxoplasma gondii can make its way into humans through contact with cat feces, eating undercooked infected beef or chicken, or drinking untreated water. (It can also be passed on in the womb—which is why pregnant women are told to stay away from cat litter.) Its effects vary: many people with Toxo don’t even know they have it; others can take seriously ill and are at risk for everything from suicide to schizophrenia.

Parasitic mind control sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but in fact that’s along the lines of what happens when Toxo infects the body. The parasite needs to reproduce, so it overrides the normal behaviours of its host to achieve its own goals. Rats infected with Toxo lose their fear of cats, and in fact become attracted to their scent because it would bring the parasite closer to its natural habitat.

When Stanford University professor Robert Sapolsky first read about Toxoplasma gondii, he was “blown away” by the parasite’s ability to manipulate a host’s behaviour. Other parasites affect human behaviour, he says, “but in terms of the behavioural profile—one cluster of traits related to increased risk of schizophrenia, another cluster related to neuropsychological and behavioral dis-inhibition—there’s nothing else like [Toxo].” Findings linking Toxoplasma infections to increased risk of car accidents are of particular interest to him. If people infected with Toxoplasma become less inhibited and more reckless, they’re more likely to do things like speed. Sapolsky recalls talking to Toxoplasma clinicians over lunch one day. One doctor piped in about his own medical experience with the parasite. “It had to do with when he was a medical resident, doing a rotation in transplant surgery,” Sapolsky says. “He remembers an old surgeon telling the residents, ‘Whenever you get an organ from someone killed in a motorcycle accident, check it for being Toxo-positive. Don’t ask me why, but there tends to be high rates of Toxo in those donors.’ ”

Two recent independent studies showed that when compared to people with the same severity of depression, people infected with Toxoplasma were more likely to attempt or commit suicide. These findings point to impulsiveness, Sapolsky says. Doctors have also identified a correlation between Toxoplasma infections and schizophrenia, says Dr. Robert Yolken, director of developmental neurovirology at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. “What a number of researchers have found is that you take a population of people with schizophrenia, wherever they are, the rate of Toxoplasma is somewhat higher than in the controlled population,” Yolken says. Most people infected with Toxo aren’t schizophrenic. “But there are a small number of people where evidently it contributes to the disease,” he says.

Perhaps the strangest theory surrounding the parasite comes from House, who argues that soccer teams from countries with high Toxoplasma infection rates fare better at the World Cup. Infection increases testosterone in male brains, he says, making them more aggressive and less inhibited. “Brazil, France, Germany and African countries all have some of the highest infection rates in the world, and generally that’s associated with cultures of eating raw meat, which is the most common way of getting Toxo,” he says. “I was watching the World Cup and I recognized that the countries that had more Toxo seemed to be winning.” House admits the relationship is not foolproof. Ghana, with an infection rate of 92 per cent, ranked well below first-place team Spain, which has an infection rate of 44 per cent.

House first became interested in Toxo after reading an article in Discover called “Do parasites rule the world?” He says if they do, Toxoplasma gondii is just the beginning. “Conceivably, we’re going to learn there are many more of these types of parasites influencing behaviour that we just weren’t aware of,” he says. “A tiny neurotransmitter, a tiny drug, or a tiny parasite that potentially changes neurotransmitter levels can have profound impacts on your personality, both individually and at large culturally.”

Talk to people living in the North about why the violent crime rate is so high compared to the rest of Canada and you’ll hear about the “complex” or “unique” problems “up here.” But it’s not until you listen to Peter J. Harte, a lawyer in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, tell the unimaginable story of a young woman he knows that you can begin to understand what that means.

At 13, the girl was sexually abused by her brother. This only came to the attention of police when they questioned her about why she was trying to put her little sister into hiding. Her brother wound up in jail, and the teen was placed with a foster family in another community.

Almost immediately, the foster father began sexually abusing her, too—which police learned about this time when they encountered the girl running down the street naked. The man was convicted, but just before sentencing he hung himself. With no place else to go, the girl returned to her home community, where her brother, now free, nearly beat her to death.

“That,” says Harte, “is the first five years of her teenage life. Now she’s got a four-page criminal record, which is mind-boggling for a woman.” Maybe not surprisingly, adds Harte, who is the senior criminal counsel for the Nunavut legal services board, “it includes convictions for hooking to get drugs or alcohol to dull the pain.”

This young woman’s heart-wrenching situation speaks to some of the factors that experts say have caused the epidemic of violent crime in Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon: the trauma of sexual and physical abuse, the frequency of suicide, the pervasiveness of addiction, the geographic isolation, the lack of social services. The desperation or rage that drives people to do things they might never otherwise consider.

Taken together, these issues help explain why in 2009 the North had the nation’s highest—that is, the worst—score on Statistics Canada’s Crime Severity Index (CSI). In this, our third annual “Most Dangerous Cities” report, Maclean’s is using the CSI for the first time as the basis for our reporting. It’s a number developed by Statistics Canada using police reports to determine the seriousness of crime in a given area, and it allots more weight to the worst offences such as homicide or sexual assault. As in past years, Maclean’s also tracked trends by commissioning from StatsCan a run of six indicator crime statistics—homicide, sexual assault, aggravated assault, robbery, breaking and entering and auto theft.

Almost invariably, the North turned up as the most dangerous part of the country. Nunavut, the N.W.T. and the Yukon took the top three spots respectively in the CSI ranking of Canadian territories and provinces. They also had the highest rates of sexual and aggravated assault.

Nunavut and the Yukon had the first- and second-highest homicide rate, followed by the N.W.T. in fourth. And Nunavut and the N.W.T. also had the first- and second- highest rates of breaking and entering, and auto theft in the country—with the Yukon still above the national rate. Admittedly, the national CSI score has dropped 22 per cent since 1999. But in Nunavut, the N.W.T. (and Newfoundland to a far lesser degree), crime scores have risen in that time.

Although the North has been a political magnet of late—with much attention paid to Canada’s claim to sovereignty, to resource development and fears of Russian planes flying overhead—the reality of rampant crime has often been overlooked. For the people who live in the three territories, though, it may be the most pressing issue they face—one that will have an indelible impact on their very future.

The crime problem is only made more troubling by the fact that it’s occurring in a country like Canada, says Scott Clark, a professor at Ryerson University’s department of criminology in Toronto. Having worked for more than 30 years in the North as a consultant and in government, including in Nunavut’s Department of Justice as assistant deputy minister, Clark doesn’t mince words: “We really should be ashamed,” he says. “We pride ourselves as Canadians on having a good country and a fair country, and we prize equality and helping our neighbours, but when you see what’s happening it just makes you want to hang your head.”

It’s worth noting, of course, that the small population of the North—109,275 people across all three territories—magnifies its crime, as the mayors of Yellowknife and Whitehorse point out.

They and experts emphasize that not everyone in the three territories has been directly affected by violent crime, and the devastation it creates. It is still the minority of individuals who cause the majority of problems. For example, while Nunavut’s homicide rate is 931 per cent higher than the national average, that translates into six murders last year in a territory with 32,183 residents. That may not sound so bad until you compare it with a more populous place such as St. John’s, which is almost six times larger but had zero murders. Similarly, there were 211 sexual assaults in Nunavut versus 165 in Windsor, Ont., which has seven times as many inhabitants. And there were 28 aggravated assaults in Nunavut compared to 20 in Richmond, B.C., population 191,376. Meanwhile in the N.W.T., where 43,439 people live, there were 717 break and enters, versus 711 in Red Deer, Alta., which is more than double the size.

At the root of all this crime is “alcohol, alcohol, alcohol,” says Chief Supt. Steve McVarnock, head of the Nunavut RCMP. “When alcohol comes into the communities the majority of them will experience a spike in police-related activity.” Even places that have decided by plebiscite to prohibit alcohol are often sabotaged by bootleggers. Pangnirtung and Arviat are both “dry,” but they experienced an increase in crime in 2009 compared to one year earlier, says McVarnock. In March, he adds, officers arrested two individuals in Iqaluit who had ordered 2,800 60-ounce bottles of vodka, which sell for up to $500 each in smaller communities.

What’s driving people to drink is a toxic mix of historical suffering and modern-day insufficiencies. The legacy of residential schools continues to haunt those individuals who endured the physical, psychological and sexual abuse first-hand. In many cases that trauma has been passed on to their children, who didn’t receive the necessary emotional and practical support. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder plagues many young people, and can cause behavioural problems. As traditional ways of life such as hunting, fishing and carving have faded, a sense of what Harte calls “cultural dislocation” has beset many in the North. With so few employment opportunities—in Nunavut there are only five communities where getting a job is a viable option, says McVarnock—youth have an easy excuse for dropping out of high school; and they do, at a rate of 75 per cent, notes Clark. Add to this limited recreational activities and you get many idle hands—and a recipe for trouble.

For those individuals who seek help, human rights advocate Lois Moorcroft bemoans a lack of resources—too few crisis centres and second-stage housing for women and families trying to get their feet under them after fleeing domestic abuse. With “very few residences, often women have no other option than to go back to the houses where the men are violating them,” says Moorcroft, who serves on the advisory committee for the review of the Yukon’s police force, and was previously appointed to the territory’s human rights commission.

That most communities have limited roads or are fly-in only can literally trap individuals in a bad situation, adds Barb McInerney, executive director of Kaushee’s Place, a women’s shelter in Whitehorse. Plus, a lack of affordable housing means that “if women have to give a sexual favour to get somewhere warm, or to have a couch to sleep on, then they manage how they have to.” The shortage also has led many to live in cramped, substandard housing—which can cause the type of irritation that may escalate to violence. Or it may stymie the efforts of individuals trying to get clean, adds Harte, or a good night’s sleep so they can get to work or school the next day.

All these factors are only compounded by inadequate numbers of police, probation officers, lawyers and judges, all of whom need to be well-versed in the aforementioned issues to be most effective. In July, Senior Judge Robert Kilpatrick of the Nunavut Court of Justice submitted a report to the federal minister of justice warning of an impending crisis, and calling for additional appointments. So far none have been made, although more deputy judges have been added.

In the meantime, there are small signs of hope: in April, a new mental health unit was announced in Nunavut, staffed with two suicide prevention specialists. Youth are rallying in anti-violence marches. Several reviews are under way, including one of Nunavut’s Liquor Act.

Efforts toward more “therapeutic justice” and sentencing circles are spreading. The Canadian High Arctic Research Station will ideally pump money and jobs into the North, and there is a growing number of southern RCMP officers who are signing up to serve in Nunavut. In fact, in May, McVarnock moved his officers into a new building in Iqaluit that is as much a morale boost as it is a practical necessity.

Professor Clark applauds the individuals who are running the justice system for their dedication and hard work, especially given their limited resources. But he says that improving the crime rates in the North doesn’t just fall to them. “The justice system is really the end of the line. It’s all this other stuff: education, health, housing, that has to be improved. With that improved over the long term we might see real change and there might be less crime. But it’s going to take a long time and a lot of work.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/canadas-shame/feed/14Your movie’s finally here, Tylerhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/your-movies-finally-here-tyler/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/your-movies-finally-here-tyler/#commentsThu, 30 Sep 2010 20:20:38 +0000macleans.cahttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=149414A non-native filmmaker describes what it was like making a documentary on a native reserve

October 2007: I’m on a 12-seater plane headed for Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation in Ontario, 600 km north of Thunder Bay, Ont. Below, boreal forests and lakes. On my lap, a box of Timbits I’m increasingly nervous about. When I called the band office, Sandra told me there were no “customary” gifts like tobacco, as in the south. I insisted: I had to bring something. She said, “Well, the chief likes donuts.” I’m sure they’re hard to get up here. When the plane stopped in a community en route, the “washroom” was an outhouse at the end of the tarmac. But Timbits—was she pulling my leg?

I don’t want to make a faux pas. I’m a non-native hoping to film a documentary here, so I’ve done my research, visited many other First Nations communities. Still, I’m unprepared for K.I. When we land, it doesn’t feel like we’re in Canada anymore. I try to keep my expression neutral as a youth worker drives me around, but I’m shocked. This is one of the more prosperous fly-in communities, but it looks like a ghost town: plywood nailed over windows, peeling paint—yet apparently inhabitants feel lucky. At least they have houses. Two hundred people—in a community of less than 1,200—are on the wait list. Only two to four homes are built every year; with no roads, it’s insanely expensive to transport building materials.

When I interview Chief Donny Morris—the Timbits were well-received—he explains that only a certain percentage of funding from the federal government can be spent on housing. His own place is spartan. No bedroom door, just a blanket.

There’s no evidence of the wild overspending you hear about, except on groceries. Early on, I come up with the bright idea of making dinner for two boys I’m filming. But at the northern store, I quickly realize I don’t have enough cash. Milk is $16, a box of diapers, $43. Forget fresh veggies—I go for canned, and grab some pork and cheap cookies: $36. No wonder the chief was out hunting when I first tried to meet him.

November 2007: Five-year-old Tyler is fascinated by my cameras, so I let him take as many photos as he wants. We’re outside, setting up, and his brother Kyler, 6, is pulling my tripod around on his sled. They are laughing, wild dogs race past, the air is bracing. A surge of happiness—then, immediately, guilt. Happiness feels wrong. The boys have six other siblings; their father, mother, and stepfather have all committed suicide. Who is going to care for them? How can they stay together? It’s a big worry in K.I., and a focus of my film. Earlier, the boys acted out how their father hanged himself. He’d locked them in the house with him. The tape feels like it’s burning a hole in my coat pocket.

March 2008: My daughter, Camille-Sophie, 7, is with me this trip. She’s having so much fun with the dogs and the boys that she doesn’t seem to notice the contrast between K.I. and home. Until, at the end of our stay, the leaders of the community, including the chief, are led away to prison for peacefully protesting a mining company’s exploration around their ancestral lake. Two months later, the courts will set them free, but for now it registers in the community, and with Sophie, only as an injustice no one can do anything about. We say goodbye to the leaders, now in shackles. In 12 years of filmmaking, it’s the only time I’m shooting through tears. Back at school, her friends talk about their trips to Disney World. Sophie tells the class, “Well, I went to prison with my mom for March break!”

October 2008: I used to believe that being respectful of Aboriginal issues meant remaining silent—I’m not native, what right do I have? But politically correct silence permits a kind of blindness to what’s happening to kids like Tyler. Almost since we met, he’s been asking, “You’re not done that movie yet?” Finally, the answer is yes. I want to tell him I’ll come back soon, but a ticket to Australia is cheaper. And the distance between First World Ottawa, where I live, and the Third World conditions of K.I., make it seem even farther away.

Third World Canada premieres at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto on Sept. 30

A Cree woman I’ve known for many years up in Moosonee, Ont., has been in such anguish for months that I fear for her life. This anguish, this word, can’t begin to describe her tortured suffering. She lives every day walking through what most of us would consider our worst nightmare. A year ago, her 17-year-old son, while at a house party full of friends, walked from the kitchen, where he’d found a short indoor extension cord, through the crowded living room, to the bedroom, and eventually into a closet. There, he wrapped the end of the cord around his neck, and, leaving a foot or two, he tied the other around the clothes rod. This thin young man, pimples on his chin and black hair he wore short and spiky, knelt so that his full weight took up all slack. In this way, he slowly strangled himself to death.

If you have the fortitude, think about that for a minute. He could have stopped at any time; he could have simply stood up to take the pressure off. Possibly he did once or twice or three times when the fear of what awaited overcame him, when the happy noise of his friends in the rooms next door drifted in, muffled. But eventually, with unbelievable will, with a drive he’d never exhibited in his young life before, he managed this gruesome act of self-destruction.

Last week I attended the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s first annual gathering at the Forks in Winnipeg. Residential school survivors along with their families came together from all across Canada. The first day alone an estimated 20,000 people gathered to speak about their experiences or to see old friends or to soak up the evening concert that included Buffy Sainte-Marie and Blue Rodeo. Despite the rather festive feel of the first day, the pain, the same anguish that my Cree friend feels, was palpable just below the surface. The sunny skies turned to rain the next couple of days as if in mimicry.

An Anishnabe medicine man I know, when he speaks of the creation of residential schools, says that a door was opened that should never have been unlocked. For Westerners, his rather poetic view might be comparable to letting a sinister genie out of a bottle. One of the many evils that escaped out that door, the medicine man believes, is the tremendously high Aboriginal youth suicide rate in our country. He believes, as do many, that this suicide epidemic is a direct effect of residential schools where generation after generation of families were torn apart by the system. What’s certainly fact is that suicide among Aboriginal groups before residential schools was almost unheard of.

As I’ve mentioned, this Cree woman in Moosonee, my friend, has lived in anguish since the suicide of her son. Her 15-year-old daughter did, as well. She was close to her brother and went through most all of the stages of grief: disbelief, anger, a stabbing sadness. But she wasn’t able to make it to the last stage: acceptance. Five months after her brother was found hanged at the party, my Cree friend found her daughter hanged, this time in her own closet at home, and this time actually kneeling, leaning slightly forward as if in deep prayer.

How does a mother go on after that? This Cree woman, my friend, she’s from a tiny, isolated James Bay reserve named Kashechewan, 160 km as the bush plane flies north of Moosonee. Kashechewan is like a hundred other northern Canadian reserves. But unlike most, Kashechewan made the papers a handful of years ago when more than 20 youth attempted suicide in a single month. I remember reading about it on page five of the Globe and Mail and not being surprised. I’d lived and taught up there. The reserve’s reputation preceded it.

People in Moosonee warned me each time when I was to travel to Kash and spend a few days, a week, teaching adult community members reading and writing skills. These people said, “Be careful. It’s a dangerous place. It’s a rough reserve. A lot of people up there are crazy.” No warnings ever—and strangely, I might add—more specific than that. What I found were a lot of amazing people who became dear friends.

And I found a sadness difficult to define, lingering just below the surface of day-to-day living. My Cree friend, now the mother of two dead children, she’d left Kashechewan to live in Moosonee years ago, which to her mind was moving to a big town, in part to escape that insidious sadness of her reserve.

It’s the same sadness I can feel seeping from residential school survivors as I wander through this first annual gathering at the Forks. Groups huddle in large tents, rain popping on the roofs. They sit in circles and take turns speaking about their experiences. Some are resigned and speak matter-of-factly, others in hiccups and sobs. There are very few dry eyes and my initial feeling that I’m eavesdropping on something I shouldn’t be dissipates when someone invariably cracks a joke and smiles light up the circle.

My Cree friend didn’t know then what she knows now, that this sadness I speak of, this hurting, isn’t only isolated in Kash. This hurting has spread across the northern reserves and heavily Indian communities of Canada. It spreads more easily than H1N1, and it’s been infecting northern communities for many years. It’s deadlier than any epidemic since the smallpox and tuberculosis eras.

The oldest son of one of my dearest friends in the world, he’s made something of himself. He’s a young Moose Cree man with a brand-new wife and a brand-new career as an OPP officer. On my last visit to Moosonee, he told me something that continues to devastate me, that sounds unbelievable it is so brutal. Over a six-month period recently, there were at least 100 suicide attempts among teens in Moosonee, and many others in the neighbouring reserve of Moose Factory. At last count, eight youths in Moosonee have been “successful.” They’ve hanged themselves in closets, sometimes in trees behind the high school. It appears a death cult is taking root. More than 100 attempts. Eight suicides. In a community of 2,500. Yes, it appears to be a death cult.

If this statistic darkened non-Indian towns across, say, British Columbia or Manitoba or Prince Edward Island, if this epidemic struck one of our communities, it would be national news, the media frenzy so saturated that Canadians would suffer empathy burnout within months. My quick Google search—suicide rates on Canadian reserves—pulls 36,000 results in 0.28 seconds. Within minutes, I can learn that since at least the year 2000, many experts have declared that the northern reserves of our country are the suicide capitals of the world. Statistics on these pages, I think, quickly stun then numb us. And the reasons why our Aboriginal youth are strangling themselves in closets, are shooting themselves in the head, are drowning themselves in icy rivers? A few more minutes of keyboard tapping on Google and it becomes so obvious: miserable socio-economic conditions, psycho-biological tendencies, the post-traumatic stress of a culture’s destruction.

And what can even begin to stem the tide of brutal loss? The one and only family services centre in Moosonee, Payukotayno, which serves all of the 14,000 Cree of the Ontario side of James Bay, almost had to close its doors in December 2009, not long after my good friend’s children’s suicides. That was due to a severe lack of government funding. It’s expensive to try and furnish these services in such remote areas. The experts agree, though, that it’s vital. I’ve been told of 14 youth suicides on the west coast of James Bay in 2009. One in 1,000 committed suicide last year. The Canadian average, I’m told, is one in 100,000. Suicide rates on the west coast of James Bay are 100 times higher than the Canadian average in 2009. And the only family services facility for the west coast of James Bay came within inches of closing its doors last year for a lack of funding.

Before I paint such a painfully bleak picture, let me be clear that for each story of loss there is a story of accomplishment, of perseverance. Here’s one: while wandering around the Forks last week, I ran into a young man, Patrick Etherington Jr. from Moosonee, a young man I’ve known since he was a boy. In fact, for much of one year I home-schooled him. After a brief catching-up, he told me something startling. Over a month ago, he and his father, Patrick Sr., along with a few friends, took a train from Moosonee to Cochrane and then began walking. They walked over 1,600 km in just over 30 days in order to get here for this first annual gathering.

Along the way they talked to strangers, explaining that they were walking for the people, that this was their own little way of helping to begin shutting that door that was opened when the first doors of the residential schools in Canada began opening 150 years ago.

Patrick Sr. is a man I’ve held in great regard for 15 years. When I lived in Moosonee so long ago and became close with the Etherington family, Patrick Sr. shared with me some very tough and yes, shocking stories of his years at St. Anne’s in Fort Albany, one of Ontario’s most infamous residential schools. And now, here he is walking with four young people across a substantial part of Canada because he understands that the epidemic I speak of is contagious, and one way to protect your children is to engage with them in as direct a way as you can. What better way than to spend more than a month walking and talking and laughing and sharing the joys and pain of such an adventure?

Six more Truth and Reconciliation events are planned across Canada over the next five years, six more chances for people to come together and share stories and discuss remedies and keep straining to push that door shut.

What I’m convinced of is this: the simple act of taking that first step on the highway with your father and best friends beside you, the tension of the fast-moving river through your paddle, the radiant heat in the moose’s rib cage as you reach your arm to cut out its heart, the sound of Canada geese honking as they stretch their necks for the south, the tug of the pickerel as it takes your hook, the sickening grind of the outboard’s prop as it touches submerged river rock—it’s these simple experiences that contain medicine strong enough to start some healing, to start closing that door.

Sometimes I catch myself dreaming about my Cree friend’s two dead children. In my dream they’re still alive, and they’re out in the bush, paddling the Moose River together, sun on their shoulders and good power in their stroke. They’re paddling north, I think, home to Moosonee. And although I can’t see her, I know that their mother stands on the shore by town, waiting patiently for them to come into sight.